“This is the third year in a row that Cadillac has been one-two at Daytona,” said Mark Kent, the director of General Motors\u00a0Racing. “The attraction to drivers like Alonso is they want to be in a product know they can win in. If you\u2019re on the outside looking in, the Cadillac prototype\u00a0is the natural choice as\u00a0the car that can win.”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Alonso’s feat generated headlines across the globe for Cadillac which is growing in markets like China and posted a global sales record last year with over\u00a0380,000 cars sold.<\/p>\n
Cadillac’s wins parallel\u00a0GM’s success in GT racing, where Chevy’s Corvette racing program also took home the 2018 drivers\u00a0crown (the Corvette team struggled at Daytona). Caddy’s fortunes are the culmination of two decades of investment in motor racing beginning with its production-based, V-series racers in 2004.<\/p>\n
Cadillac has built its racing cred\u00a0even as its production lineup has struggled to compete in U.S. showrooms. Sales in 2018 were down by 1 percent to 154,702 units.<\/p>\n
The brand shuffled its captain chairs last year, replacing ex-Audi North America\u00a0chief Johan de Nysschen with Steve Carlisle and closing down the brand’s headquarters overlooking the Hudson River in the Big Apple.<\/p>\n
Carlisle opened the Detroit Auto Show this January with a promise that Cadillac is back in Detroit \u2014 and back in the luxury game.<\/p>\n
“Let me say with no offense whatsoever to the good people of the city of New York,” said Carlisle as he unveiled\u00a0the all-new, three-row Cadillac XT6 SUV. “Cadillac is back in Detroit, and more determined than ever to reclaim the mantle as catalyst.”<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
With the XT6 and the smaller XT4 released in 2018, Cadillac hope to make up lost ground in SUV sales where Cadillac has lagged German manufacturers like BMW that have flooded\u00a0the U.S. market with multiple models.<\/p>\n
Cadillac even finds\u00a0itself behind in battery-powered cars,\u00a0a segment it helped pioneer in 2013 with the handsome\u00a0plug-in ELR coupe. Cadillac ditched the ELR \u2014\u00a0and its cousin Chevy Volt \u2014 and has re-trenched with a new “BEV-3” electric vehicle platform designed to compete with BMW’s i-series and Jaguar I-PACE EV\u00a0models.<\/p>\n
“We are working to elevate Cadillac to a position at the pinnacle of mobility,” said Carlisle.<\/p>\n
The racing team is already at the pinnacle. So admired is Cadillac’s racing program that it attracted four teams racing six cars at Daytona this year. That’s double the number when Cadillac debuted its 600-horsepower bat-mobile in 2017.<\/p>\n
The program’s success in prototype racing came after a decade of\u00a0five Pirelli World Challenge championships with the CTS-V coupe.<\/p>\n
“Racing gives us the opportunity\u00a0to show people through\u00a0motorsport what Cadillac\u00a0stands for,” says racing boss\u00a0Kent. “It gives us an opportunity to demonstrate technology, reliability, and also…\u00a0bring our production vehicles\u00a0to the race track for people to look at some of our amazing products.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the Cadillac brand, 2019 promises a year of transition as the luxury automaker returns its headquarters from New York City to Metro Detroit and plays catch-up to competitors\u00a0in the race to satisfy demand for SUVs and electric cars. But when it comes to sports car racing, everyone is chasing Caddy. Cadillac’s IMSA prototype program […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23363"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/presto\/2019\/01\/30\/PDTN\/370e50b2-8e79-49a2-9eaf-9d2b77b1b9ca-Caddy_podium.jpg?width=520&height=390&fit=bounds&auto=webp\")
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