Our good friend John from Michigan is planning to attend the Cadillac Attack event in Florida later this month. We’ve known John for a long time, and second place isn’t really his thing. When he dropped off his beautiful Crystal White Frost sedan we knew he’d want the full Brown Belt treatment. John now has one of the best powerbands ever produced by any ATS-V, and we can’t wait to see what the car can do at Cadillac Attack!

It took our team more than one year to hit 700 whp with the CT4-V Blackwing. The CT5-V Blackwing should easily cross that threshold next month, on pump gas, only two months into the process.

We did four baseline runs over the last 15 days, ranging from 614 to 621 whp on a DynoJet with SAE correction factor and smoothing = 5. We decided to use the median 619 whp pull as our official starting point.

We installed Green performance air filters, Kong Stage X ported supercharger, Nick Williams 103 mm. throttle body and got 673 whp.

Next we switched from the 2.50 to 2.30” GripTec supercharger pulley and installed Brisk RR12S spark plugs with .027” gaps and got 694 whp. All runs were done using 93-octane pump gas.

Next month we plan to add Kooks competition headers, a little more boost and also start testing with ethanol fuel blends. We’ll be shooting for 730 to 750 whp.

Special thanks to Alek from Illinois who loaned us his car to experiment with!

We bolted our new carbon fiber intake to a completely stock CT4-V Blackwing, and instantly gained 30 to 50 peak whp.  Even more impressive is the 70 plus whp gains we saw near redline!  These performance improvements take place with no other changes, and no tuning required.  Idle, drivability and fuel economy will all remain the same as stock, as long as you stay out of the boost.  There are no DTCs or Check Engine light issues.  With Green performance air filters, Brisk spark plugs, JB4 tuning module and a custom tune on our in-house dynamometer, we were able to get total gains of more than 100 whp!

Myron from Maryland just picked up a very rare 2019 ATS-V coupe in velocity red with low mileage. He drove it directly to Tapout Tuning with the temporary tags still in place and requested our most popular Purple Belt Performance Package. Nobody else can tune these cars like we do, and that’s evident in Myron’s new dyno chart. By the way, ported throttle bodies were on national backorder at the time, so he’ll be adding that piece of the puzzle later.

Weston from Pennsylvania had a scary engine noise, so he trailered the car in for Jorge and Bob to work their magic. Turns out that one of the timing chain tensioners had broken, and there was no other engine damage. Per Weston’s request, we did a complete teardown and carefully inspected every single engine component. Our Purple Belt Performance Package was included in the reassembly and the car performed very well. It made 504 whp on 93-octane pump gas, and 605 whp on E53. Weston takes this car to the road course on a regular basis, and decided he would rather have a single tune that will automatically scale fueling and ignition timing for any fuel between E0 and E85, so no Kill Tune was created. Regardless, check out how smooth the new powerband is, and how it keeps pulling hard, even past 7,000 rpm!