Blackwing

Back in 2011 my buddy had a second generation 2009 Cadillac CTS-V. And he's a pretty 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 attended the Cadillac V-Performance Academy at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch, about an hour west of Las Vegas. I was the first student to go through their program. And when I say first, I was the only student back in 2012. You see I learned about the new program by accident and signed up months in advance. Later, Hurricane Sandy disrupted the Cadillac transportation pipeline and so Spring Mountain didn't take delivery of their batch of 27 coupes, sedans and wagons as originally scheduled. Since they wanted to put about 1000 miles on each before tracking them they decided to not sign up any more students for the first class. But I guess they decided they'd have a couple ready for the first date and could use me as a guinea pig for their new program. Which was awesome for me; I had my own personal instructor for two days!

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

In June of 2025 I sold the CTS-V to make room for a CT5-V Blackwing. If not for the pandemic, various supply chain issues, and rampant additional dealer markup (ADM) I probably would have bought a 2022. But I really wanted the carbon fiber options and they had been nearly constantly on "constraint", meaning any order selecting them would not get picked up by the factory.

I made contact with Dustin Callaway (aka the "Blackwing King") at Sewell Cadillac Dallas in early 2024. 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. Also, 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 as a 2025 model later that day. 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. It was transported by truck from the factory in Lansing Michigan to Sewell Dallas where it arrived on June 17th. I paid a transport company to bring the car to California and got my hands on it on July 17th.

Table of contents:

	Timeline
	Fixes
	RPO Details
	Blackwing Pictures
	Gear Ratio Calculator
	Tools

Copyright © 2025
Craig Leres