CTS-V Montage

Enjoy this short montage of footage from our recent Arizona test drives:

From the CTS-V Driver’s Seat: Part I — The Brakes

By Ed

As I mentioned here previously our ride trips give us a lot of real-world experience in the CTS-V. I wanted to give you a bit more of a feel for what that is like. And, also, nobody outside our team has had a chance to drive this upcoming car. So I grabbed a video camera. In the coming days we’ll provide a lot of different clips attempting to provide a sense for what we’re doing on the road with the car. This first clip features John Heinricy explaining some of the aspects of the car’s ride and handling, particularly how the feel of the brakes was engineered.

John is my boss. But beyond that he’s an SCCA champion driver and one of the industry’s best-known performance experts, it’s fair to say. What some folks might not realize is John’s deep connection to Cadillac. He’s the owner of a vintage Cadillac, has contributed engineering work on many production Cadillac cars, and has periodically been a “guest driver” in the CTS-V race car in SPEED World Challenge professional races.

Anyhow, we taped this clip and a few others while in the midst of driving the CTS-V in Arizona recently.

Gisela, Arizona

By Chris

Ed’s post above on our first trip to Arizona refreshed a memory for me also. We ended this ride at Phoenix International Raceway. You’d think that would be the highlight of the trip, right? After all that’s a full-on professional track with an infield road course where we ran the cars pretty hard. But, actually the highlight might have been a much less famous place – Gisela. This very small town (pop. 532) in the mountains right in the center of the state has some great twisty, tight mountain roads around it. Awesome, in fact. So please don’t tell anyone. We don’t want it to become overrun with traffic!

To the Desert

By Ed

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 geeked. This was one of the very first times we ventured outside of our “home” proving grounds with the car, an important milestone.