Enter turn one, give the electric steering — which boasts reasonable feel, by the way — a slight tug to the right to initiate some weight transfer, and simply back it in to the left-hander. Mash the gas, the rear comes around and you can control the degree of sliding with ease. This car was built to go sideways, and I obliged. A lot.
Thorough testing, I’d say.
What else? The six-speed manual gearbox, with its rev-matching feature and no-lift-shifting, is a real charmer. That no lift shift enables you to keep your foot matted to the floor and simply stab the clutch while changing gear. It helps keep the turbos spooled up.
As for the eight-speed auto with its torque convertor clutch, well, it certainly saps some of the emotion from driving. Positives: It does a great job selecting the gears for a given corner when in auto mode, and it is quicker over a lap than with the stick. Negatives: When using the paddles the shift times simply aren’t that fast, and there’s no evocative snap, crackle or pop.
The auto isn’t a dual clutch, which has become commonplace in most performance cars. Why? Caddy says that, without one in the current GM toolbox, it’s too expensive to make, too heavy compared to the box they currently have, and not as fuel-efficient. The engineers would rather spend that money on creating a brilliant manual, and they believe there is a market for that.
I commend them, but there will come a time when GM needs to build an automatic gearbox that can rival the best dual clutches in existence — expensive or not. In fact, that time is probably already upon us.