Yahoo Autos Learn to Drive at Cadillac V-Performance Academy
I swore I was getting turbo lag. I'd haul the ATS-V down to second gear for the right-hander at the end of the back straight, turn in, hit the apex, and mat the throttle. Nothing, for several seconds, followed by a swell of torque as the 3.6-liter twin-turbo V6 finally spooled up. At the end of my lapping session, I called over an instructor to complain.
He suppressed a grin, and asked which drive mode I was using. Like the Corvette and Camaro, Cadillac sport sedans offer GM's Performance Traction Management system. Set to Track mode, PTM offers five levels of traction, stability, and chassis control, offering a safety net that dwindles, then disappears as you progress to more aggressive settings.
A few prods at the mode selector confirmed my issue. "It's not lag," the instructor explained. "In this mode, the engine won't make boost until the chassis is settled. If you go up a level, you'll get boost immediately, but you'll have to be more careful about getting on the throttle too early."
A driving instructor's job, in part, is to gently deflate the ego of a know-it-all novice by dismantling bad habits and replacing them with good ones. At Cadillac V-Performance Academy, I got plenty of that. But I also came away with a more in-depth understanding of the specific ways Cadillac designed the V-Series performance sedans with the racetrack in mind. And the folks at Caddy want every ATS-V or CTS-V buyer to do the same.
Purchase a model year 2017 464-horsepower twin-turbo ATS-V or 640-horsepower supercharged CTS-V, and you'll get free entry to the V-Performance Academy, hosted at Spring Mountain Motor Resort in Pahrump, Nevada. Everything - the two day course, lodging in a trackside condo, and meals - is included. All you have to pay for is the travel to Nevada. And the car.
What awaits you in Pahrump is an intense two days of classroom and behind-the-wheel instruction. V-Performance Academy instructors split the students into groups of two to four based on skill level; as R&T's least-experienced trackday wheelman, I joined the beginners. After an introductory classroom session on basic track safety, we strapped into our cars. Spring Mountain boasts a large fleet of manual and automatic ATS-V coupes and sedans, plus plenty of CTS-Vs in a variety of specifications, letting owners learn on a car that matches their own. I chose a manual ATS-V sedan.
The Academy follows a "learn it in the classroom, perfect it on the skidpad" approach. After a talk on braking, we performed full-ABS panic stops with lane changes. To illustrate each PTM mode, we ran a 700-foot slalom, noting the increased slip angles of more aggressive settings. And following a discussion on vision, instructors slapped a sun shade over each student's windshield and sent us out on a serpentine cone course. The lesson? Trust your peripheral vision - and learn to use the side windows to gaze far ahead in tight corners. The first 90 seconds was unsettling; by the end, flying half-blind nearly felt natural.
All of that was just the first morning. After lunch, it got less theoretical, more track-applicable: Classroom sessions on cornering techniques, followed by more cone-chasing drills on dry and wet pavement. The curriculum follows a gradual pace, with plenty of time to get a full grasp of each concept. It was only in the last session of day one that we left the skidpad to lap Spring Mountain's West 1.5-mile loop.
Day two was all about the circuit. After a brief classroom session outlining the different traction and stability control settings, we embarked on a series of lead-follow sessions, instructors providing feedback over walkie-talkie. This was where we finally got to put the techniques we learned into practice - finding the apex, balancing the chassis with throttle and brake inputs, and focusing on smooth speed.
The V-Performance Academy fleet is equipped with GM's Performance Data Recorder, aiming a video camera through the windshield and overlaying throttle/brake/steering input and lap time data over the resulting video. Also on the memory card provided to each student: Hot laps recorded with Spring Mountain instructors at the wheel, a handy way to demonstrate the nuances of a fast, clean line - or to deflate your budding pride.
With the basics of accelerating, braking and shifting out of the way, and the focus turned toward the circuit, the V-Performance Academy really begins to make sense. Both of Cadillac's sport sedans are packed with capability - the ATS-V is lithe and balanced, the CTS-V a torque rocket with astonishing grip. But getting comfortable in either hot-rod Caddy - and subsequently chipping away at lap times - requires mechanical and digital mastery.
Any decent driving school will teach you the generalities of track driving, the baseline skills you can carry from car to car. But it can take years of honing to figure out the best technique for your exact car. That's the true benefit of V-Performance Academy: With the program focused on Cadillac's two highest-performing models, and the staff intimately attuned to the tiniest specifics of these cars, you get a high-performance driving school and an engineer's tour of your car's capabilities all in one. That's helpful when you're trying to learn how to take the abrupt dip in Turn 3 without lifting - or when, for example, you think your masterful driving has uncovered a crucial flaw in the drivetrain programming, only to learn that it's the car outsmarting you and your ham-fisted driving technique.
Even better? You get to do all of this without abusing that brand-new Cadillac you just bought. Toward the end of the second day, during an exercise with Cadillac's built-in Launch Control, I saw the benefit firsthand. A student in my class, a physician from the Northeast with a new stick-shift ATS-V at home, hopped out after performing a clutch-drop, no-lift-shift run down Spring Mountain's impromptu drag strip. "I'd never have had the guts to do that in my new Caddy," he said, grinning. I hope that, in the time since he graduated from V-Performance Academy, he's attempted it.
That's the benefit of Cadillac's driving school: It gives new ATS-V and CTS-V owners the chance to experience the full capabilities of their cars in a controlled environment, under the guidance and instruction of some of the most experienced teachers in the nation. And not just "brake here, accelerate here" lessons, but "here's how you access the setting that will make you faster" specifics.
Yes, to a certain type of purist, the idea of getting faster by navigating sub-menus on a screen may seem antithetical. And while Cadillac's driver school is great for novices and casual trackday attendees, it probably won't do much for a seasoned racer. If you haven't purchased a new 2017 V-series Caddy, you can attend anyway for roughly $2500, though I can't really see why you'd want to take a course for a car you don't own.
But as a way to experience the full capabilities of your new V-series Cadillac, and to learn how to extract those capabilities at your local trackday, V-Performance Academy seems like a killer deal. It may cost at least $60,000 (the price of a no-options ATS-V) to enter, but if you're spending that money on a new Caddy anyway, you should absolutely put V-Performance Academy on your calendar. (For those who can't trek to Spring Mountain, Cadillac offers single-day "V-Performance Labs" at tracks throughout the US for $1000 per attendee.)
It'll be money well spent the first time you attend a track day and hear some unknowing schlub complain about "massive turbo lag" in an ATS-V. What you do with your superior knowledge of the platform is up to you.
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