Alan,
I guess this gets back to the question I had about the headlight bucket area on my fenders. Same year, one possibly replaced but definitely not a later year or the mounting brackets should have been different.
Maybe the engineering boys decided a change was needed midstream for some unknown reason, and they were working the bugs out all through the first model year?
It does seem weird that they would change things in the middle of a production run unless there was a safety issue involved.
I guess when it comes to these cars you can never say 100% that it has to be "this way" to be correct.
Greg