Cadillac Loves the CT5-V Blackwing So Much It Keeps Obsessing over the Chassis

We love the CT5-V Blackwing, Cadillac's rear-wheel-drive, V-8 thunderbus. When we heard Cadillac had developed a "Precision Package" for it, we struggled to think of what they might be changing, because there wasn't anything . . . well, wrong with the car.

The short answer: As we have seen firsthand, Cadillac's engineering team includes a lot of people who love performance driving, and they can't stop obsessing over the details of the CT5-V Blackwing's chassis. A few years ago, when Alex McDonald left the Corvette team for a job as chief engineer for Cadillac's sedans, a group of people there were developing an "SCCA-capable" package for the smaller of the two Blackwings, the six-cylinder CT4. (A CT4 is currently racing in SCCA's Touring 2 class.) They never planned to produce the car, but the parts "pretty naturally" found their way onto a CT5, a development car painted white and named Skeeter. It had custom dampers and "some really interesting suspension choices that were very track-focused, like, I mean, not a great road car," says McDonald, "but it was spectacular, it was so much fun to drive. It was everything that the Blackwing is, but just completely tuned up to be incredibly track-focused."

So they began to develop that group of parts into an option they could offer on the production car-while edging the slider slightly away from track-rat toward on-road comfort. Their guiding light was a tire: The Michelin Pilot Sport Cup, the track-day favorite from GM's tire partner in Greenville, South Carolina.

"We know [the Pilot Sport Cup] offers huge lap time capability, huge confidence, and controllability in the car," says McDonald, chief engineer for the CT5 and its little brother, the CT4, "and we know a lot of our customers are putting it on their car to go to the track already." The chassis of the "regular" Blackwing CT5 was "just a little too compliant," he said, giving as an example the way the car puts down power on corner exit. "As soon as your foot touches the throttle, the back end of the car would come out and you just couldn't-it had an amazing amount of grip, but you couldn't put any power down.

"And so a bunch of eLSD calibration allowed us to let the differential compensate for that a bit." That differential, as Sam Smith observed at length when he drove the car at Barber Motorsports Park, is a technologically intricate piece of kit that somehow manages to behave quite naturally. Together with stiffer springs and revised dampers, the recalibrated diff works with the Cup tires to "soften that initial hit" of power, says McDonald, "so you could really get deeper into the throttle on corner exit."

Corner exit isn't the only place you'll feel the changes of the precision package, notes McDonald. "A lot of people say this is a CT5 that drives more like a CT5, which is a way of saying it's just a little more dialed into your steering precision, a little more predictable, especially in a heavy braking zone. The car is just locked in."

The front sway bar is new. The front knuckles are a new, unique casting that accommodates more camber. All four springs are stiffer, with increased spring rate. The dampers are revised to work in concert with those new springs, which benefit from revised top mounts and isolators. The front suspension has new ride links and stiffer bushings. The rear knuckles of the suspension also allow for more dramatic camber adjustment than on the "regular" CT5-V Blackwing. For drivers who want maximum control over the setup of their car, Cadillac has included a unique toe link that comes, uninstalled, as part of the Precision Package. Revised lower trailing links round out the suspension changes, along with a new front bushing for the rear cradle that is 1000 percent stiffer than the one it replaces. It's still rubber, though, not nylon or aluminum-though they did try solid-mounting.

"It wasn't right," says McDonald. "The car would bang over bumps. You'd feel heavy input over impact. So backing off to a very stiff, compliant bushing was really right where this car wanted to be."

Even better, you won't notice most of the changes as you're driving to the track. The increases in the stiffness of the chassis, McDonald says, are only really obvious if you go diagonally across a speed bump. "On most normal roads, it's a really nice compromise."

Carbon ceramic brakes are also included, which means the rotors shed heat better than steel and give the driver more effective stopping power over a longer period of time.

This concert of changes to the suspension would never have worked out without the MagneRide dampers. "You've seen a Honda Civic just bouncing down the highway, where they've put lowering springs in but not done anything with the dampers?" That's what it felt like, McDonald says, when they first put the new springs, knuckles, and toe links on the Cadillac. Over the course of weeks, they kept recalibrating the dampers, until the bounce disappeared and they had gotten a ride worthy of a Cadillac sport sedan. The dampers, he says, "are an insane tool."

If you are the kind of person who reads spec sheets very, very closely, you'll know that this car, like the newest Escalade, has MagneRide 4.0. Most of the changes from the first to the third generation of the system were focused on the circuitry in the damper-specifically, optimizing the way the circuitry pulled energy out of the coil. From gen three to four, the biggest change was with the sensing capability: Rather than measuring acceleration at the wheel using a lever on an electric potentiometer and a linkage in the suspension, MagneRide engineers added an accelerometer on the knuckle.

"It used to be with MR," says McDonald, you get really good control of the big body motions, so you could sort of get that magic carpet ride over big bumps, but as you rolled through a parking lot on little bumps, they'd come right through because MR didn't have fast enough information to deal with it."

Faster information, he says, is always better.

So much of the genius of this package lies in the calibration of the dampers, steering, and differential, he says, adding that with "all the money in the world, you can't build this car." ABS, traction control, stability control, performance traction management-along with the drive modes, those have all been tweaked.

All the Precision Package goodies arrive in time for the mid-cycle refresh of the CT5, an update that left the driveline untouched but massaged the sheetmetal and blessed the interior with Cadillac's 33-inch touchscreen.

Precision Package cars will start production early next year. If you're wondering whether the Sport Cup tires come with it-the release is notably silent on this point. McDonald did say that Cadillac wants "to make it easy to get the Cup tires on the car," so stay tuned. We get the sense a deal is still being struck. That would explain why pricing isn't yet available.