Disregarding the tony black slacks he’s wearing and the wet garage floor, Dave Leone is on his knees. “Look at this,” he says, shoving his hand between the top of a Cadillac CTS Coupe’s rear tire and the upper fender lip. “I call this the ‘Leone Finger Test.’ If three fingers fit, the gap’s too big. What I got here is two and three-quarters, max.”
He’s not done yet.
Leone next positions a ruler flat against the side of the flared rear fender and flat against the tire’s sidewall. “See that?” he asks, beaming. The ruler is perfectly vertical. “The wells on this car are completely filled, and the wheels line up flush with the body. Makes it look squat, purposeful. If you’ve got wheels just floatin’ around in there, well, to me that looks like a fat lady on skates.”
Leone has spent 30 of his 52 years toiling exclusively for Cadillac. He is the global chief engineer for the CTS—the sedan, the wagon, and now the coupe, arguably one of the most striking GM cars ever to choke its wheel wells.
2011 Cadillac CTS-V Coupe
Every panel from the base of the coupe’s A-pillars forward is identical to the CTS sedan’s. Every panel aft of the A-pillars is unique. “We had zero interest in creating a CTS sedan minus two doors,” Leone says. He lovingly sweeps a hand over the windshield and roof. “The front glass is laid back an extra two degrees,” he notes, “and the roof is two inches lower, blending back into this radically raked backlight. We really hunkered her down.” So much, in fact, that the seats had to be mounted 14 millimeters lower than the sedan’s.
But Leone’s proudest achievement may be those flared rear fenders—“tautly swollen,” he says of them—which were made possible only by widening the coupe’s rear track by two inches. Consequences ensued.
To get the stance he longed for, Leone had to persuade GM to bless the coupe with more rubber at the rear than at the front. The FE3 suspension on the V-6 coupe, for instance, features 245/45R-19s up front, 275/40R-19s at the tail. But then the handling didn’t suit Leone, so rack after rack of experimental anti-roll bars were trotted out. Coincidentally, both the CTS Coupe and the CTS-V Coupe felt most neutral with a 29mm front bar (versus the sedan’s 31) and a 25.4mm rear bar (versus the regular sedan’s 20 and the V’s 24). Leone then firmed up the damping at all four corners, obtaining, he says, “0.88 g [of grip] for the V-6 car and 0.9-something for the CTS-V.” He jacked up the final-drive ratio to 3.73:1 from 3.42:1 for most models, dialed out every remaining iota of on-center steering slop, then blasted ’round the “Lutz Ring” (GM’s road course at its proving ground in Milford, Michigan), pronouncing both coupes “more planted, easier to place, harder to disrupt, and sharper on turn-in.”
2011 Cadillac CTS-V Coupe
2011 Cadillac CTS-V Coupe
2011 Cadillac CTS-V Coupe Rims
| Chassis | |
| Wheels | 19-inch cast aluminum wheels |
| Brakes | racing-bred Brembo brakes |
| Drivetrain | |
| Transmission | automatic |
| Engine | |
| Horsepower | 556 |
| Supercharger | supercharged V-8 engine |
| Engine & Transmission | |
| Torque lb-ft (Nm) at RPM: | 551 lb.-ft. |
| Exterior | |
| Tires F-R | Michelin Pilot Sport 2 performance tires |
| Length | 51 mm |
| Height | 51 mm |
| Interior | |
| Navigation | advanced |
| Performance | |
| Acceleration 0-60 mph s: | 3.9 seconds |
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