We’ve just completed a pretty important series of on-road drives and track tests in Arizona. We will share some stories from this most recent trip soon.

In the meantime, this latest trip got me thinking of our last trip to the desert. It was one of the first important early drives we had. This shot comes from the little town of Payson, Arizona. These are very early prototype cars, basically “standard” CTS cars we turned into V-Series cars. This route through Arizona gave us a lot of elevation change and temperature change, with some pretty good twisty roads for a fairly comprehensive early test of how the car could turn out. At this early stage of the game (about a year ago) we were roughly at the halfway point, in terms of the calibration of systems throughout the car. My lasting memory of this trip: We started to fully realize that -- holy cow -- this car is powerful. Numbers on paper are one thing. Feeling it on the road is quite another. I had recently come into this program. After this drive, I went from excited to absolutely blown away. This was one of the very first times we ventured outside of our “home” proving grounds with the car, an important milestone.