Cadillac CT5-V Drags Mercedes-AMG C 43 (V6), Someone Gets Surprised in the End

Sam, the host of the Sam CarLegion channel on YouTube, has prepared a drag-and-roll race skirmish with American and German DNA. The protagonists are pretty evenly matched – they brought on the moist tarmac on a former airfield runway somewhere in Canada a couple of executive sedans with four doors and about the same weight and horsepower.

One is the underrated Cadillac CT5-V (not the Blackwing, mind you), which uses a 3.0-liter twin-turbo V6 packing 360 horsepower and 405 lb-ft (549 Nm) and sends power to the rear wheels by way of a ten-speed automatic transmission. The other is a Mercedes-AMG C 43 – the V6 one, not the mild hybrid inline-four version of the current W206 generation, with about the same power, weight, and a nine-speed automatic transmission.

Some would say this is a fairly balanced skirmish, right? Do take into account that Sam always conducts his tests away from public roads, but the area is nothing like the prepped surface of a quarter-mile dragstrip. Sure, the road was recently sprayed with a fresh coat of tarmac, but it's clear the builders didn't do a great job of eliminating the former runway's potholes. Anyway, that makes the races a lot closer to what happens in real life on the street.

As such, it is no wonder that Sam sometimes chooses to start these encounters with the roll races – and as per tradition, they are performing a couple of them, from 50 kph/31 mph and from 70 kph (43 mph). Obviously, while the two executive sedans feel pretty balanced on paper, only one of them can take home the victory in this test – that would be the Mercedes-AMG, which narrowly beats (by a whisker) the cooler-sounding Cadillac during the low-speed skirmish and clearly bests it at higher roll speeds.

With that in mind, you would think the drag race was a given. Well, surprise, surprise, the CT5-V starts like a rocket and puts enough distance between it and the Mercedes-AMG to shame it for the rest of their encounter. Of course, you can't only blame it on the car; the drivers always factor in, so maybe the C 43 owner wasn't as experienced as Sam, who probably has thousands of drag and roll races under his belt by now.

Hopefully, we will see more of the Cadillac CT4-V and CT5-V during such encounters – these executive sedans are genuinely some of the most underestimated gems of the American automotive sector. As for Mercedes, probably no one likes the switch to four-pot engines and (mildly) electrified powertrains; as Sam states right from the beginning, he searched for a V6 Mercedes on purpose so as to avoid embarrassment…