I'll say up front that I find it very hard to believe that Bill Simpson would knowingly participate in anything of this sort. He has a very long association with race safety and was directly involved in many crucial innovations such as Nomex(tm) suits.
This sounds more like the work of a mediocre business school graduate applying standard logic about leveraging the reputation while cheapening the product to improve margins. The fact that this stopped happening with the 2009 production year suggests that this imagined business school graduate either smartened up or got fired. The real problem is that the old stuff is still out there, in race cars and hanging in driver's closets. And the reason why I say mediocre is that you can sort of get away with this kind of logic if you're selling fast food, but race safety is no place to fool around.
