Blackwing

Blackwing

Back in 2011 my buddy had a second generation 2009 Cadillac CTS-V. And he's a good friend because he loaned me his car for a few weeks while I was in town visiting; needless to say I had a blast.

The following year, I went to the Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch, which is about an hour west of Las Vegas, and attended the Cadillac V-Performance Academy. I was the first student to go through their program. And when I say first, I was the only student in 2012. You see I learned about the new program by accident and signed up months in advance. Hurricane Sandy disrupted the Cadillac supply chain pipeline in 2012. This meant Spring Mountain didn't take delivery of their initial batch of 27 coupes, sedans and wagons as scheduled. Since they wanted to put about 1000 miles on each before tracking them they decided to not sign up any more students by the first class. But I guess they figured they'd have a couple ready for the first school date and could use me as a guinea pig for their new program. This was awesome for me; I had my own personal instructor for two days!

Rumors about the third generation CTS-V were strong around this time. This is when I made the decision to buy one. It arrived as a 2016 model and was glorious, but for some stupid reason Cadillac didn't offer it with a manual transmission. That was a deal breaker for me so I ended up buying a 2014 Certified Pre-Owned Cadillac. 2014 was the final year of second generation CTS-V production. That year Cadillac produced 754 CTS-V sedans and 81 of these were 6-speed manuals.

The CT5-V Blackwing was announced in early 2021 as a 2022 model. I decided to order one. And if not for the pandemic, supply chain issues, and rampant additional dealer markup (ADM), I probably would own a 2022. But I really wanted the carbon fiber options. These were nearly constantly on "constraint." The GM order process prevents an order that has options on constraint from being picked up for production by the factory. Dealers are only interested in submitting orders that have a chance of being produced. So I waited.

In early 2024 I made contact with Dustin Callaway (aka the "Blackwing King") at Sewell Cadillac Dallas. Dustin is well regarded by members of the Cadillac V-Net forum and Sewell Automotive Companies have received more Blackwing allocations and have sold more Blackwings than any dealer in the world. Sewell is more than happy to special order vehicles at MSRP (and with no BS).

In March 2025, Dustin called to tell me he had a no-constraint allocation for me. He asked me to share a cadillac.com build code with the options I wanted, and I was on my way. The order was accepted for production by the factory later that day as a 2025 model. Sometime later a target production week (TPW) was assigned for late May. The car ended up being built on May 21st, the week before the TPW. In early June of 2025 I sold my CTS-V to make room in my garage. The new car was transported by truck from the factory in Lansing Michigan. It arrived at Sewell Dallas on June 17th. I paid a transport company to bring the car to California and got my hands on it on July 17th.

My LT4 was built by Ben Walden on April 14th.

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