2022 Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing tackles 'trackcross': PTM is life

SOUTH HAVEN, Mich. — While Autoblog's long-term 2023 Toyota Sienna is nominally still in my care, it was whisked away from me to deal with some underbody damage sustained during a previous excursion. No matter; I had plans last weekend that were not remotely served by the presence of a minivan. See, some friends of mine were involved in organizing a "trackcross" event in western Michigan. For an area where people take Halloween as the over/under date on a first snowfall, that's either brave or foolish. I like to think I'm a little bit of both. So for this week's "long-term update," you're getting one from one of my personal cars: a 2022 Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing, aka the one with the wrong engine.

Now, I need to confess something: I haven't been to a track on my own time and dime since February, 2016. Sure, I've attended a multitude of automaker events that include some track exposure — including the one that led me to purchase the Blackwing in the first place — but it's easy to let life get in the way of the hobby. And not to make excuses but in that time, I've changed jobs twice, gotten divorced, moved five times (spanning three different cities), bought a house (and sold one), and churned virtually my entire personal fleet three times — save my 1990 Miata. Some say life is what happens when you're not looking, but it seems to fly by with my full attention just the same. Getting "back out there" just hasn't been my top priority.

Since moving to Michigan, I've kept my SCCA membership active and my eyes open for opportunities to have some fun. When this Out Motorsports event landed in my feed, I jumped on it. A new track and a new car? That sounds like an excellent learning opportunity. And like a normal track event, it would be casual — or at least as casual as any event can be when the participants are part of one of the most inherently competitive hobbies on earth. Even with nothing to win, strictly speaking, we were all sure as hell going to try.

And that's how I found myself at GingerMan Raceway the weekend before Halloween, gridded up in 40-degree weather with rain threatening. GingerMan is tight and flat with tons of runoff. Our organizers took that inherent safety advantage and dialed it up to 11 by slicing off bits of the longer straightaways and creating an autocross-like environment with separate, defined start and stop gates. Hence the name "trackcross"; it really is just an autocross on a race track. A brief googling suggests that GingerMan's Spec Miata track record is in the 1:46 range. Those are flying laps, of course. We won't be doing any of those. Still, it's a solid bogey for getting a street car around a chunk of the track in a timely manner.

Both days started off cold and damp. Saturday's weather eventually broke, giving way to a sunny afternoon with temperatures in the mid 50s, but the transition from a green track and cold tires to a functional grip situation was neither instantaneous nor without some teething. A green track in cold temperatures and summer tires? I've seen this episode. But I'm here to move on, not dwell. And for a little extra insurance, I turned to an acquaintance I made last year when I attended Spring Mountain Cadillac V-Performance Academy: a little something GM calls Performance Traction Management, or PTM.

PTM is GM's secret weapon in the war on all-wheel drive. As insanely good as the CT4- and CT5-V Blackwings are, they're held back in a field where the competition (in BMW's case, with a capital "C") has access to four driven wheels. PTM helps you extract every single bit of performance you can despite this inherent disadvantage, and in combination with Cadillac's Magnetic Ride Control and the Blackwing's trick e-diff, it can make you faster in seriously spooky ways.

To be clear, PTM is not a branded name for electronic stability control, nor is it merely one of the Blackwing's drive modes. You'll need to put the car in "track" mode in order to access it, which should be a clue as to its purpose. If you're using this on the street, you're doing it wrong. This is not a system designed to keep the car pointed straight when it snows on your way to work; it's engineered to help you extract every ounce of performance from the car on a race track, period. Put another way, if standard stability control is something that intervenes before you can exceed your traction limits, PTM differs in that it helps guide you there and no further.

Adding to the potential confusion, PTM has five modes of its own: Wet, Dry, Sport, Race 1 and Race 2. As you can probably guess, that represents a sliding scale from the most to least electronic intervention. PTM Wet aggressively smooths out your throttle inputs and keeps the rear diff from overstepping its bounds, while Race 2 provides a virtually 1:1 relationship between your inputs and the car's outputs, but it'll still throw you a bone when you're trying to extract those extra hundredths.

This is a lot to keep track of, admittedly, but Cadillac makes it simple to access. The rocker switch on the right side of the wheel cycles through PTM modes with the simple flick of your thumb — up to tick toward Race, down to tick toward Wet. You can also program a PTM level into your individual drive mode if you're so inclined, and then assign that to the "V" button on the steering wheel. Set it once, then all you have to do is double-tap the button on the left side of the wheel and boom, you're ready to rock.