The 2014 Cadillac CTS Vsport was one of the cars wrung-out on Virginia International Raceway at Car and Driver magazine’s eighth annual Lightning Lap, and as the folks at the aforementioned publication note, they had to “keep reminding [them]selves that the Cadillac CTS Vsport has 420 horsepower.”
“It’s not that the Cadillac lacks power,” they write, “it’s that the Cadillac copes with its power so effectively that it feels slower than it is. Jaguar used to call that grace under pressure.” In fact, the Cadillac CTS Vsport compares rather favorably to the Jaguar XFR-S, which was also tested this year. Despite its sizable 130 horsepower advantage, the Jaguar XFR-S only manages to edge out the Cadillac CTS Vsport by one-tenth of a second, at 3:06.7.
Weighing in at almost 4,000 pounds, the Cadillac very easily uses up the available grip of its Pirelli P Zeros, but that weight also contributes to the nature of the CTS Vsport to pass through corners and over curbs unperturbed. The car is apparently also very predictable when it crosses that grip threshold: “Here, a loss of traction isn’t an emergency; it’s a trip without a fall.”
The Cadillac CTS Vsport performed more admirably than its lack of “melt your face off” longitudinal-acceleration would have most believe, ranking just ahead of the BMW M235i.
The performance achieved by this Vsport model certainly has us drooling at the thought of the next supercharged CTS-V, due for 2016. How about you?
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