Alright: here's some thoughts on the game:
With regard to flavor: The vast majority of roles were based on specific positions occupied by real people, and the flavor text provided to these roles was a description of what those people would do during a race. That those did not totally line up with what roles certain people had did not concern me. As an example, the race director doesn't issue penalties. Rather, the race director refers potential infractions to the race stewards, who are the ones who issue the penalties. I recognize this may have caused some confusion, but at the same time, flavor is flavor, mechanics are mechanics, and only one of those is important. :)
In reducing the setup I cut a few roles.
They were as follows:
Team Principal: A bus driver. Cut because I don't like bus drivers.
Dirty Driver: A serial killer w/ investigation and penalty immunity.
Cameraman: An extra tracker/watcher aligned w/ the TV crew. This was replaced with the Interviewer.
In addition, the Bitter Veteran was originally also just plain old investigation and penalty immune, and this was reduced to a one-shot in order to pair down the mafia a bit.
The removal of the SK presented another problem which I did not catch (and ended up not mattering), which is that a single correct lynch made the TV Crew's primary win condition assured (I'm honestly somewhat astounded that that didn't happen). Had I thought of that, I probably would have increased that to Night 6.
I was also going to assign names to people based on the roles they received, but decided against that to prevent anybody who knows anything about racing from having an advantage in the event of a mass claim.