• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, July 15, 2011

There are some oddities about the Monticello Motor Club, where I went on Monday to participate in a test-drive program spotlighting the Cadillac V-Series, Cadillac's V-Series Performance Lab experiential project, and the luxury brand's return to racing.

The oddest juxtaposition is that the track, a club for the über-wealthy who fly in on copters from Manhattan to drive their McLarens, Porsches and Ferraris really fast, is in Monticello, N.Y., which is an economically depressed area surrounded by Orthodox Jewish family camps. So, if you happen to drive up to the track, you pass legions of women in ankle-length dresses pushing strollers in 95-degree heat (as was the case on Monday.)

It costs about $125,000 to join the club and yearly dues are somewhere around $7,500, in case you're interested. I got to go because Cadillac, which sponsors the track, brought up reporters on the tail-end of its three-day consumer and owner event there (the above-mentioned V-Series Performance Lab.)

Cadillac has actually been doing the lab for two and a half years, five events per year in as many of its national regions. The company says the program is important because it aligns with the brand's decade-long mission to reinvent itself as a performance luxury marque. V-Series is central to that. The latest piece of that is Cadillac's return to motorsports with modified V-Series coupes racing in the SCCA World Challenge.

John Heinricy, the technical director of Cadillac V-Series and former director of GM's high-performance vehicle operations, who led development of testing of V-Series from concept to production, was on hand at Monticello, and took time to give reporters a ride, racing style, in production V-Series vehicles.

I buckled in beside him in a coal-colored V-Series Coupe for a hot lap around the track, expecting a fairly pedestrian ride. I'd done hot laps before. But this was different because Heinricy is a serious racer type. In 2008, he drove the 2009 CTS V-Series car that broke records for the fastest-ever lap on Germany's Nürburgring Nordschleife track in a production sedan.

While I was BS-ing with him about how well I knew the track (I'd actually been up there once before), Heinricy floored it. I think we hit 6 G's. The track is technical, meaning it has a lot of very gut-wrenching turns, hidden curves, dips, bus stops, and reverse banks, so I found myself trying to look nonchalant as we approached the first turn after a straightaway at maybe 430 miles per hour.

Luckily, I was able to unscramble my brains long enough to compose a mental note to my wife, asking her to donate my socks to Goodwill as we hit the curve. I tried to calm myself by counting the number of times I figured the car would cartwheel before it came to rest in the woods.

Something called "stabilitrak" kept us alive. I staggered out of the car several hours -- someone insisted it was a few minutes -- later determined henceforth never to travel in a conveyance with more horsepower than an adult tricycle driven by a retiree with bad knees in Clearwater.

I grabbed Jim Vurpillat, global marketing director of Cadillac, for an interview, mostly as an excuse to avoid the Cadillac SCCA race car and its driver, Andy Pilgrim. Pilgrim was taking reporters on hot laps in that car, and I'd stupidly signed up to go early. Now I was rethinking, realizing hot laps in that car would be to what I'd just done what riding on the shuttle would be to standing too fast after a big lunch.

Vurpillat said the sponsorship at Monticello puts 20 CTS V-series sedans on hand for members and that the just-complete V-Series Performance Lab brought in 600 consumers for the six sessions, two per day, He said two-thirds of those who came own vehicles like Mercedes AMG, BMW M-series cars, Jaguars, Porsches and the like. One-third is a Cadillac customer.

"We knew we wanted to have a high-performance program. The original CTS gave us credibility for performance sport sedan. But while doing that, we did research. We wanted a high-performance car that would be not only as good as those cars but could beat them." He said since the company introduced the new V-Series CTS, Cadillac has outsold BMW M5 and M-B's AMG, combined.

"We don't build these cars for sheer sales numbers alone, though," he said. "[We do it] to win the hearts and minds of performance enthusiasts." Thus, he said, getting into racing made sense. "From a marketing standpoint, everything Cadillac does in the new race program ladders up to the V-Series."

So why bring the V lab to Monticello? "The largest luxury market in the country is 90 minutes away. It's about exclusivity. This is a very high-end, exclusive track, and we wanted to be involved in that," he said.

Vurpillat added that Cadillac is also introducing a performance driving academy that will be run out of Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch outside of Las Vegas the last weekend in October.

Cadillac gets participant response via an email query that includes in-car video of their driving experience linked to track telemetry that shows where they were on the course during each moment of the video. "We ask them to fill out a survey about the experience," says Vurpillat. "They are blown away with the instruction [by Skip Barber], how the car performs, how they were treated and made to feel."

Unfortunately, I couldn't get away from my ride in the race car. Someone called my name and they stuffed me into a fire suit. By now it was about 137 degrees outside, and in the cockpit of the race car, with the 500 hp engine basically in my lap, it was hot enough to cook a leg of lamb (Andy Pilgrim, so I heard, had to get ice dumped into his fire suit after every other run, and they had to siphon it out before it boiled). The noise was pretty much deafening when he cranked the engine. A few seconds later we got the okay to go, which is good because I was starting to feel a little nauseous and figured it would be less embarrassing to hurl on the back loop than in front of my fellow idiots, not to mention the woman who helped me into the suit.

I'm not quite sure how to describe the experience. I'm at a loss. I'd never been in a race car before, so the only thing I can compare it to is a dream I had where I was trying to escape that "It's a small, small world" ride at Disney World, and I suddenly took off like a bat out of hell. But we were going faster than that. Too fast for human comprehension. I'm pretty sure on the last straightaway we actually travelled through a worm hole and went back in time for about five seconds.

When we hit one especially brutal turn my nose actually left my body and returned to my face in a former life. They had to use a spatula to remove my kidneys from the glove compartment after the ride.

"I like to say that racing is the promotional platform for V-Series," said Vurpillat, as they wheeled me over to the ambulance. "Everything we do in racing links back to V-Series."