20-02-2025
2025 Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing at Lightning Lap 2025
From the March/April 2025 issue of Car and Driver.
Class: LL3 | Base: $135,890 | As Tested: $145,580 Power and Weight: 668 hp • 4137 lb • 6.2 lb/hp Tires: Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R; F: 285/35ZR-19 (103Y) MO1, R: 305/30ZR-19 (102Y)
For 2025, the CT5-V Blackwing sports a facelift and, far more intriguing, a Precision package, a $9000 bundle of chassis upgrades such as stiffer springs and bushings, more aggressive alignment, and stickier Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R tires.
Despite the extra stiffness, the Blackwing still inhales curbing with the best (thanks, magnetorheological dampers). Its adjustable Performance Traction Management, which allows you to dial in the amount of traction- and stability-control intervention, remains a wonderful sidekick, trimming power to optimize traction. You can hear it working when the exhaust note goes from rip-roaring to garbled. But it's acting out of necessity, as turning everything off was a short-lived experiment in how sending 668 horsepower through two tires equals a lot of powerslides.
A quick lap in the Blackwing requires a tight line [see 'Cutting Corners,' below] and attacking apexes early. Getting the fastest lap needs to happen when the tires are fresh, because after one lap, the grip slightly subsides, and the Blackwing settles into a pace that's about two seconds slower per lap. But unlike most street cars, especially luxury sedans, the Blackwing is happy to hot-lap for the duration of its 17.4 gallons of fuel, which translates to about eight 4.1-mile laps. And the carbon-ceramic brakes (a $9000 option required to spec the Precision package) never show a hint of fade.
Compared with the Blackwing we ran three years ago, the new Precision-package car is a little quicker nearly everywhere: a couple of miles per hour through the Climbing Esses, where the new car is easier to place, a few more through the off-camber left that follows, and an average of nearly two miles per hour in the tight Infield. Times through Sectors 1 and 4 improved by a half-second apiece and in 2 and 5 by a few tenths each. In Sector 3, the two cars were in a near dead heat, leaving the latest Blackwing ahead by 1.5 seconds. That means the CT5 pulls in front of the Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door and, surprisingly, the C8 Corvette Z51. The lap comparison with the Porsche Panamera Turbo S, the quickest gas-powered four-door, is interesting, with the Cadillac ahead by 0.8 second at Oak Tree but the Porsche reeling back all of that time, primarily in the Infield, leading to a photo finish in which the Caddy comes up a tenth short.
Whittling down lap times is our goal during Lightning Lap, but in addition to carrying more speed, you can also work the other side of the equation by reducing distance traveled. Bill Wise, Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing development engineer and one of GM's hottest shoes, shared that his laps that are quicker than colleagues' are often fractionally shorter, which prompted us to look at that detail from this year's field. No doubt thanks to Wise's excellent coaching, our corner clipping and curb jumping in the CT5 resulted in the shortest lap of 21,533 feet, or 4.08 miles. At the Blackwing's 87.9-mph average speed, every 13 feet equates to a tenth of a second, and the difference between the CT5's lap and the longest, in the Ioniq 5 N, which traveled 71 feet farther, is worth more than a half-second. Of course, there are limits to the possible gains, as hugging the inside of the track for the entirety of a lap reduces speed enough not to be advantageous. Some vehicles are so unsettled by curbing that they lose time, which requires a wider line to find the fastest time.
Back to Lightning Lap 2025
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