GM Considered Using C7 Corvette ZR1’s LT5 V8 In Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing

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The upcoming 2022 Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing ultra-high-performance luxury sedan is an extremely powerful car, thanks to the 668-horse supercharged 6. 2L V8 LT4 engine below its hood. But anyplace an LT4 can go, the particular closely related yet much more thunderous 6. 2L V8 LT5 – since fitted to the 2019 Chevy Corvette ZR1 – can go too, at least theoretically. So why is the all-new CT5-V Blackwing not installed with the LT5 instead?

At the beginning, the case for the LT5 is usually compelling. As found in the particular CT5-V Blackwing, the LT4 makes 668 horsepower plus 659 pound-feet of torque, which provides the car a 0-60 with time of 3. 7 secs and a top speed of close to 200 mph. “Adequate, ” as Rolls-Royce used to state of its motors in nations where it was not motivated to publish power figures.

But the LT5 can be something else again. It’s one of the most powerful engine that Common Motors has ever designed for a passenger vehicle. The low of its two outputs within the ZR1 was 755 hp and 715 pound-feet torque capacity.

Well, 755 horsepower is preferable to 668 horsepower, right?

Not exactly, based on Mirza Grebovic, V-Series Blackwing Chief Engineer. “When all of us initially started working on this particular project, obviously we were extremely excited to shove any motor in there and make just as much power as possible, ” Grebovic told GENERAL MOTORS Authority professional editor, Alex Luft, within an interview. But using the LT5 would have created several problems, one of which was visibility.

The particular Corvette ZR1 a new shaker hood, but “we couldn’t put a shaker hood on the CT5, ” said Grebovic. “You would need to make it so high that you simply can’t see out of the vehicle, and we wouldn’t have fulfilled regulatory requirements for eyesight. ”

This could have been less of an issue if the engine had a dried out sump oil system, which may have allowed engineers in order to mount the engine reduced the bay. But the GM Leader platform utilized by the Cadillac CT5 is very different from the devoted sports car architecture used by the particular Corvette ZR1 and all Corvettes. In fact , all C7 Corvettes with the exception of the base Stingray (without the Z51 package) showcased a dry sump essential oil system, which was never the master plan for any version of the CT5. Converting the Cadillac so that it could accept the dry-sump setup would have supposed adding significant levels of difficulty and expensive engineering problems.

It would also have led to an additional problem. Like all C7 Z06 and C7 Fantastic Sport models, the C7 ZR1 ran on 335-25-20 rear tires. The maximum car tire width for the CT5 can be 305. That makes a big difference with regards to the tire footprint, and exactly how much friction is available to face up to the torque of the motor.

“So indeed, we considered the LT5, but aside of simply engineering issues, let’s state this car did create 760 horsepower, ” Grebovic explained. “We wouldn’t possess the right chassis for it. It could have been a powerful car, however it probably wouldn’t be any kind of faster at the track or maybe the quarter mile, because 305 [rear] wheels with that much power will be very tough to manage. ”

That issue, in turn, might be resolved by making the CT5-V Blackwing all-wheel-drive, but then right now there would have been yet a lot more complexity to deal with. And Grebovic has already said, as specifically revealed in a recent GM Authority interview, the plan for both the CT5-V BW vehicle and its less powerful cousin, the 2022 Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing , was that they should be obtainable solely with rear-wheel-drive .

All of that goes to show that will, despite what many of us want to believe, sometimes there actually is such a thing as excessive power.