First Look: 2009 Cadillac CTS-V

This is it. The fastest, most powerful Cadillac
ever built. The fastest, most powerful American sedan in history, for
that matter. Locked, loaded, and gunning for Europe's heavy-hitting
sport sedans-BMW M5, Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG, Audi
RS6. Read all that again. Now pinch yourself. No, you're not dreaming.
Motown -- well, GM at least -- has its mojo back. Meet Cadillac's
monster new CTS-V. Cadzilla, if you will.

Here
are the raw numbers: 550 horsepower at 6200 rpm. 550 pound-feet of
torque at 4000 rpm. They're only official "estimates," but as the
engine under the new CTS-V's
power-domed hood is fundamentally the same as the supercharged V-8
that's credited with 620-plus horsepower and at least 600 pound-feet in
the hot new Corvette
ZR1, you can safely assume the real SAE-certified figures will be
close. "I'm confident we'll disappoint nobody with the numbers," says
Ed Piatek, the CTS-V's program engineering manager.

There
are no performance figures yet, but by way of context, AMG's E63 Benz
nails 60 mph in 4.3 seconds. The new CTS-V weighs about the same and
has at least 43 more horses and 85 pound-feet more torque. Draw your
own conclusions: The car also has been extensively tested on the
legendary Nurburgring Nordschliefe, and while insiders are tight-lipped
on the actual lap time -- for now -- they will admit Cadzilla has
terrorized factory hotshoes from Munich out on the daunting 13-mile
road course. "People who've never been passed by a Cadillac have now
had that experience," smiles Piatek.

Piatek works for
the GM in-house hot-shop, High Performance Vehicle Operations, headed
by John Heinricy, and was the man tasked with overseeing the
transformation of the COTY-winning CTS into Cadzilla. He had good raw
material to work with: Unlike the previous model, the new CTS was
engineered from the outset with the high-performance V-series model in
mind, with extra stiffening and strengthening built in. "That was a
lesson we learned with the first CTS-V," says Piatek. "If you start
with this [idea] going in, there may be a small mass penalty on the
base car, but there's less cost and tooling needed to do the V."

As
a result, the basic CTS body structure is little altered. Most of the
changes that have been made-mainly around the front and rear suspension
cradles and the suspension links-are purely to handle the much higher
cornering loads induced by the specially developed 19-inch Michelin Pilot
Sport 2 tires and the prodigious torque output from the engine. On that
last point, everything rear of the front transmission flange has been
beefed up. There's a larger-diameter prop shaft, and asymmetric
halfshafts (one side is a 55mm-diameter unit, the other 35mm) to help
reduce wheelhop under full power launches).