FIRST DRIVE: 2025 CADILLAC CT5-V BLACKWING PRECISION EDITION IS THE BEST YET!

I was invited out to Georgia to test out a brand new track focused Cadillac. We're talking a derivative of the CT5V Blackwing. This is the Precision Package. Designed, developed, engineered to drop lap times by the seconds. Created by an engineering team wanting to push the envelopes to chase an even faster lap time. I'm curious to find out how it stacks up against the previous CT5V Blackwing of years prior. Will it be worth the six-figure price tag and how much further can you push a car that's using the same amount of horsepower? So when I first heard they were making a more track focused Cadillac CT5V Blackwing, at first I didn't know what to expect. I've tracked the Blackwing before on great tracks such as Chuckwalla Raceway. How could they improve it even more? It's got 668 horsepower with a 6.2 liter supercharged V8. It sounds incredible. You get a manual transmission and thinking about it, what other competitors in this class can give you a manual transmission? So I thought it was checking all the boxes initially. But when you consider a team like Cadillac with their V-Series department trying to find ways to polish out an already fun experience, that is what intrigued me. So I had to come out. Today we're at AMP, Atlanta Motorsports Park, and I'm going to get behind the wheel on the racetrack to see how it comes together. This is actually a private club and around me we can see homes alongside the track, similar to Thermal Raceway where we were just at doing our recent track battles and tests a couple months ago. Here's the deal, the Precision Package is all about the independent gritty stuff that us track going enthusiasts really like to talk about. That is camber, also spring rates, stiffness, and more. So with this vehicle you can be track ready and come out here with north of negative two degrees of camber. They've really increased the spring rates, so for example they're 70% more stiff up front and 60% out back, and the team really is proud about talking about how towards the rear end their new rear cradle bushing is a thousand percent stronger. But let's put those performance upgrades on pause for now until we drive on track. I want to quickly talk about what's changed towards the front end of this vehicle. You have a redesigned front fascia and as you can tell right here it looks really aggressive with the widened blacked middle grille. You can get an optional carbon fiber package. I love seeing all the exposed carbon fiber bits. We talked to the engineers and they were showing us photos of the wind tunnel testing and more where they really spent a lot of time developing how the airflow interacts with the entire chassis. Brake cooling is very important. You have carbon ceramic rotors with this car so the heat dissipation will be even better than with standard iron brakes. I'm very excited to see how it comes together. You also have new signature sacked LED lights that are from Cadillac with their newer models coming out. You get the choreographed walkway and entry lights so that's a cool thing to flex with. Another neat upgrade you get is that with the Blackwing package itself you're not only getting the upgraded front Brembo brakes but the rear Brembos, well there are rear Brembos, the standard CP5 VV series doesn't come with rear Brembo brakes so I think for coming to the track, braking is one of the most critical and most important things. It's a must in my opinion. Let's keep moving all the way back. So finally walking all the way out back you have the same quad trapezoid exhaust pipes. I really do like all the extra carbon fiber. I'm curious because with the stiffer suspension settings I'm guessing the rear end is going to feel more stable because typically when you have looser spring rates and go to stiffer spring rates you're going to get more of that initial transfer and I think it'll help with shifting weight more effectively for precise inputs. We're going to find out though, we're definitely going to find out. Anyways let me get inside and start it up for you. All right getting inside the Cadillac CT5 V Blackwing as with the standard CT5 the interior will be pretty much the same. If you haven't seen my 2025 CT5 V review I'll have a link on top of screen right now floating. What's basically new is the technology, the processing speed and the touchscreen capabilities. It's impressive. This is a 33 inch color LCD display and when you're looking at it I mean you don't really need to use your Apple CarPlays or your Android Autos I don't think because the standard built-in Google systems it's pretty amazing. This whole screen if I turn on right now everything turns into a map so it's all integrated beautifully with the built-in Google interface. I want to comment about the PDR. The PDR system has been completely revamped. We've been hearing from individuals from the Cosworth team who develop PDR. There's a ton of stuff that is dedicated specifically for this car and it's more so focused on bettering your lap times with speed tips, delta markers and more. When you're driving it's actually going to be telling you on this right side of this display a lap time delta if you're let's say faster so be minus 5.5 seconds or plus 0.5 seconds. Well when it's doing that telling you that you're quicker or slower. Well anyways sometimes it's hard to see if it's a negative or positive number. This on the display will turn green or red just like some of those portable track systems you can put in your car. It's pretty cool so right here you can hit the start button and when you hit record this is dash cam mode on so you can leave it always rolling but you can select different tracks or learn a track where you can come to the vehicle get ready to go in the morning drive out on track save it and then you're good to go. It's really cool all the different controls this display is extremely quick you have all your AC controls built in to the center screen. Going back to the maps itself just look at this look how responsive this display is. Going over here here's your Cirrus XM, your different broken down box view, moving to the hot spot you have hot spot but look at this my favorite page you have live readouts for your power your horsepower output your torque output and your boost with the supercharger. You can even change these up if I go down right here this is going to show us if I hit the power it's not doing it yet to drive it actually anyways it'll give you a live readout like a dyno graph of how much horsepower you're putting down. Finally on this page you can customize all your different independent pages for track driving. You can analyze your ELSD coupling what it's outputting also on the right side your g-force gauge so this is nice all the customization you've got. When I go into v-mode so with v-mode obviously you have that track focus center gauge you have all the important indicators you're looking for like coolant engine coolant also oil pressure also temp. Moving to the right you can customize your favorite settings for the track we're just going to drive in sport one that's what they really want you to be in uh then when you're on a track day yourself and you want to really push the limits you can go to race one race two I guess we can explore these later on. Launch control is activated right here in the bottom left of the display click this one time and match the conditions and it'll let you control your rpm and your slip the optimal slip that you're looking for to maintain a proper launch control depending on what surface conditions you're driving on. Well that's going to wrap up our interior walk around let's give it a few revs and then get on the track. Here we go getting a feel for the new Cadillac CT5V Blackwing very excited about this team has been fantastic out here today let's get a feel for it let's get that ac off too slight trail I'm gonna stay in third gear here because there's so much low end torque let's just see if we can carry that power out a bit better oh yeah third gear works great right there trail braking it in late turn in full power all the way out this thing is fun trailing in slight brake get on power right about now before the dip a little bit late on the brakes right there wow late turn in power right up on the curving there we go brake hard riding third gear would be a bit gentler in the turning right here so I can really get on power on the whole way out this thing is fun this thing is fast it's crazy how a four-door a Cadillac could drive like that with a manual transmission there's something about this experience that you don't really find much anywhere else anymore times are changing actually let's get out of the car and let's talk with one of the engineers about what went into developing this track special so we're at the chief engineer for the CT5V Blackwing Alex how's it going it's great to see you now I first met him a couple years ago when he was part of the Corvette team but it's great seeing him part of the Cadillac team because what they're doing with this vehicle behind me it is unique but I do want to ask Alex a few things regarding how they recalibrate like the subsystems for the vehicle I think let's start there if you don't mind I know with the cup two r's that's a whole different level of grip how did you guys go about tuning everything to handle the more high speed cornering g's so there's two important parts when you do a cup tire in a car number one the cup tire if you put the tire on a chassis that's not ready for it you end up overwhelming the chassis with the tire so you get to the end of the suspension travel you hit jounce bumpers it's just uncoordinated so the first thing we did was we addressed what the chassis needs to work with the cup tire that results in stiffer springs stiffer bushings sometimes like a thousand percent stiffer I mean significant changes to the chassis and added camber settings via changes to the knuckle and a new rear toe length so all those come together to work fundamentally with the chassis from a hardware standpoint and then once you get that hardware you could have that hardware on a car that you built yourself but you can never have the calibrations to go with it without a team of integration engineers that we had work on this car to redo the elsd performance traction abs mr steering all those calibrations have been overhauled for the new chassis components and for the cup tire did you guys know from the beginning that we wanted to put on cup two r's for this new version the spark for the car was when we started working on some seca packages and we had really high grip tires from a number of brands that showed well on the sedan packages uh and so the cup two we have a great relationship with michelin they're a strong partner uh these cup two sizes were uh ready for the car on the shelf uh so it was a natural partnership um it's an incredible tire I don't think there's anything better uh so the point of looking elsewhere wasn't didn't really make no I totally understand why because you know I did buy the chz06 with the z07 package and the grip they get those tires is but I do want to ask you when it comes to getting these cars ready for the track you know camber is a big thing right how much more camber can you get out of this car and like for example today do you know what we were running on track I don't the specific settings I don't know what we did is we added three quarters of a degree in the front and one degree in the rear so that's what the added mechanical components allow you to do is to increase from our uh black wing track camera settings precision packages three quarters degree more in the front and a degree more in the rear yeah and I know for a fact us track going enthusiasts you know being able to adjust like that for each track especially for tire wear too not not only lap times but that really helps to maximize how long you can go yep and it's part of accommodating the cup tire cup tire likes some camber likes more camber than the ps4s yeah just because of the grip it's developing 10 millimeters wider in the front there 285 uh and then the standard size in the rear and I have one final question for you too um I know we're talking a lot about how the rear cradle bushing is a thousand times stronger thousand percent yeah so how exactly would would you say you can quantify that behind the wheel um versus driving back to back with the standard black like I know on track the whole rear end just felt very stable I felt the increased stiffness you have less chassis roll less body roll and I felt more confident um but is there a better way to explain like what exactly that does for the average viewer yeah for sure so I like to focus on that bushing it's kind of a shock value it's it's a thousand percent stiffer but there's I don't know dozens of bushings on the car that have been adjusted from where they were uh that's that's the one that's the most uh most significant change but what you notice in the car particularly interesting is the steering the way you feel the steering and I'm not talking at the limit just turn in and the the steering feel a lot of that is dictated by how precise the rear of the car is so when we stiffen the bushings in the rear of the car along with the changes in the front that has a huge effect on steering before you even get to the track and then when you get to the track when you do abs breaking especially like out here where we've got a set of s's that you're breaking across the apexes uh the um cradle that's attached by those bushings is so much more exactly located to the car that you don't have any steer effects as the wheels slip and go over curbs it's really solidly locked into the car and you feel that as a stability and uh um just a the name is good a precise way to place the car uh in the corner has the team adjusted like the slip angle you can get with the vehicle and race two for example to accommodate those increased performance tires race two was retuned a lot of that is that the car just operates in a different uh regime of lateral acceleration than it does with the ps4s so you're just opening the envelope uh and we need to fill in what happens out there um we don't control slip angle that's not a target for ptm we control longitudinal wheel slip which results in a slip angle um and I would say our targets for the amount of slip angle maybe grew a little but the bigger changes were about managing the lower amount of drive slip that a cup tire wants versus a ps4s hey you know what thank you so much for taking the time to answer my quick question to my geek about this kind of stuff that's exciting talking to someone like alex who's directly involved with such a cool role by the way so thanks for having me out yeah thanks for coming well that concludes my first drive test in the new cadillac ct5v blackwing precision package let me know what do you think based off watching this video obviously when you polish out an already fantastic car the experience gets even better that's the best way i can sum it up it's quite obvious it feels more stable it feels more intuitive and balanced for the racetrack is that your cup of tea then maybe you should consider a sip of precision thanks watch this video if you liked it make sure to like button it really helped me out and subscribe for much more great content coming out your way while you do that hit the notification bell stay up to date with all the new videos coming out i'll see you in the next episode