2016 Cadillac ATS-V Review - Automobile

Fittingly, I get a sense of this otherwise quiet and unassuming guy—born and raised in Ohio—over a massive plate of barbecue in Austin, Texas. ) Roma has been with GM since 1993, but most of his stories are about the claptrap race cars he’s owned. “I’ve spent too many holiday weekends underneath a car in the pits, trying to get it running for a SCCA club race,” he tells me between bites. Most of the engineers who work on the V cars, it turns out, have humble racing backgrounds. “The guys who work on the V cars have to truly understand performance,” Roma says. To get on the V engineering team, you have to achieve a “Level 6” certification from GM, meaning you can only be tenths of a second off a pro driver’s pace around a track. Tony’s one of the Level 6 guys. And the love of speed and precision guys like Roma bring to the table is the ATS-V’s secret sauce. And so it is the next day, at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas, that I all too easily pry him out of the pits and into the left seat of a manually equipped ATS-V coupe. He slides into the car like a man who has spent more hours in a bolstered seat than any Aeron chair. I’d already taken a fair measure of the cars, both coupe and sedan, six-speed manual and eight-speed automatic, and had come away relieved. But the car’s details show that it’s not a luxury cruiser with a few bolt-on performance parts. Source: www.automobilemag.com