It’s not enough for a high-performance car to be fast – it must also be reliable. The required period of reliability varies. In the case of a Top Fuel dragster, four seconds of full-throttle motoring between engine rebuilds is just fine. For a road-going car, such as either of the upcoming Cadillac Blackwing supe sedans, customers expect more.
The development programs for the 2022 Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing and 2022 Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing therefore included high-speed endurance testing.
“We have to accumulate a total of 24 hours of hot lapping,” Mirza Grebovic, Cadillac Blackwing chief engineer, explained to GM Authority executive editor, Alex Luft, in a recent interview.
“A lot of time it’s on the Milford East course, but sometimes it’s on a track outside our providing grounds, such as VIR [Virginia International Raceway], Gratton, Road Atlanta, Willow Springs, or Spring Mountain. The track often depends on the weather.”
Grebovic’s choice of words should be noted here. Accumulating 24 hours of hot lapping is not the same as hot lapping for 24 hours, since the total elapsed time can be considerably longer. However, during the test period, the team is “not allowed to change anything on the car but wear items per schedule. If anything breaks, or if anything happens to the car during testing, we discuss the issue, and we handle it from there.” And, presumably, set the clock back to zero.
“Luckily with our experience from the last-gen cars, we didn’t have those issues,” Grebovic added, referring to the Cadillac ATS-V and third-gen Cadillac CTS-V. “On the CT4-V Blackwing, for example, we finished testing in about a week and a half.”
The Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing will be the most powerful car that GM’s luxury division has ever put into production. Its supercharged 6.2L V8 LT4 gasoline engine produces 668 horsepower and 659 pound-feet of torque, giving the vehicle a top speed of 200 mph and a 0-60 mph time of 3.7 seconds. The twin-turbocharged 3.6L V6 LF4 engine in the CT4-V Blackwing is rated at 472 horsepower and 445 pound-feet of torque, enabling a top speed of 189 mph and a 0-60 mph time of 3.8 seconds.
Production of both models has been scheduled to start on July 5th at the GM Lansing Grand River plant in Michigan. However, the likelihood of meeting this target depends on the global shortage of semiconductors, which caused the plant to shut down on March 15th. However, production at the facility is set to resume during the first week of May.
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Comments
High performance, reasonably priced, and gorgeous styling, what more could you ask for?
You can say that again, i love i repeat, i love how these cars especially CT5 looks, it’s perfect.
I’m looking forward to hot lapping one of these CT5 V BLACKWING cars when I get my hands on one , hopefully it won’t be as long of a wait as it was on the 3rd gen CTS V . I was fortune enough to get in on 1 of the first 250 , as long as my dealer don’t drop the ball on my order .
Fantastic!! Now where’s the wagon!!
Man! Don’t tickle my mind with that! That would be glorious! The CTS-V Wagon is my favorite wagon of all time including european ones.
Am I the only one that finds the “accumulation” of 24 hours of hot lapping pretty underwhelming? That’s what, a total of 2,000 – 2,500 miles? And they say, during that period, they can’t change anything on the car but wear items according to schedule. Ok, hot lapping may do in the tires and brakes…I don’t see how you wait for the schedule on those. But what other wear items would need ot be addressed on the service schedule inside 2,500 miles. There’s something off or missing in this story.
I don’t think you realize how hard track use is on cars. Direct example: transmission fluid and filter must be changed once every day of track use on the Camaro and every 24 hours on the Corvette. Compare to a normal schedule of 45,000 miles on these vehicles.
Another example, people regularly eat 1/4 of the brake pad life on a single track day. In 24 hours of track use you can easily take the brake system components, rotors, pads, and fluids, through its useful lifetime.
Still, 24 hours for a performance car and then it goes to buyers? I have run, over a summer, maybe 6-8 hours of track time in a street car and I don’t change the fluid schedule beyond my 1 year service, just the brakes and tires. Can you imagine how many hours the new Corvette was tested on track…I would think hundreds and hundreds. Ok, this isn’t a sports car, but 24 hours of hard testing…makes it sound like they built it, tested it for a week, and now it’s on the showroom floor!
You do realize that this 24 hours of track testing is besides and on too of ALL THE OTHER testing they have done? Because it is.
There is one thing that GM doesn’t skimp on… and that’s testing and validation.
After staring at the front end and rear end styling I would have to go with the CT5 although I would prefer to have the more sane turbo hp ratings. A tenth of a second 0-60 difference is not worth the overkill IMO. They are both beautiful pieces of design.
You can always “tune” the turbo v6.