Mine is steel body, so not terribly unusual.
I'd simply tell people it's a test model. Ford is trying to make a lot of power in a car that sips gas. The biggest problem I see here is that car manufacturers, especially the OEM (Ford) would probably be after you in a mafia sort of way, if one of the paranoid government cold-war-atomic-paranoia three-letters didn't vanish you first.
Of course, if you "lose" the key, the car is worthless until they can reverse engineer the computers.
You just need to bypass the ignition on the steering column, pretty sure. Most of the computing is done in the individual modules rather than on the ECU. The instrument cluster also has a couple of compute modules.
Mine won't run without the RFID handshake in the keyfob.
Yep, and that's handled by the ignition in the steering column. My 01 has that as well as my 06.