you will eventually want to change cams. its a truck engine and the cam has all low end power. other then that i've heard the valvesprings float really bad in higher rpm so you'd want to change those. utilizing the coil packs (someone correct me if im wrong) might cause complications in upgrading the ECU later on. the coil packs i believe use eec-5 not eec-4 (4 was more versitile/less complicated thus more popular) theres a lot of info on the explorer engine on corral.net has some really good threads as well as the other mustang forums im sure. sorry i dunno if linking is allowed here pm me if you want me to give you a really good explorer engine thread. also know that the gt-40p heads on that engine will need a lot of attentions as far as getting the headers to fit properly around the new sparkplug angle. just a few things to think about but to answer your question i dont think computer-transmission communication is required to function at least but im going on a limb by saying that (someone please verify)
