Driving a Cadillac supercharged CTS-V will let nobody unimpressed! The thrill of 556 horsepower paired with 551 pound-feet of torque make it a monster. Then comes Hennessey and extract the most of the CTS-V. John’s calling it the Hennessey V700 and, as you might have ascertained, it’s a Cadillac CTS-V pumped up on the best auto-steroids available in the Houston area. One crank of the fake key and your ears quickly explain that the gnashing, metal-on-metal-on-lava sounds leaking out from beneath the floor pan don’t come from some run-of-the-mill super-Cadillac. No, something special is going on under that thar tortured hood. Viciously special.

First, a little background on the V700. As the muscular 6.2-liter LSA engine is already supercharged, Hennessey found it didn’t have to do much to extract plenty of additional power. Official numbers are 707 horsepower at 6,400 rpm and 717 pound-feet of torque at 3,200 rpm. Die hard CTS-V fans will have already noticed that Hennessey raised the redline. The stock CTS-V hits the limiter at 6,200 rpm; the V-700 keeps going to 6,600 rpm. It should also be pointed out that while those are the official numbers, peak power is actually closer to 735 hp. That’s right, we’re talking around 650 hp to the wheels. On lame-old California-grade 91 octane, too. This particular V700 is a six-speed manual, but if slushboxes are your thing, Hennessey will convert an automatic CTS-V into a V700 if you wish.

So how’d Hennessey and his engineering boffins crank up the output? They increased the cold air intake diameter to four inches and attached a smaller blower pulley and a larger crank pulley, which ups the boost from the factory’s 10 to 13.5 psi. The front-mounted heat exchanger has been swapped out, upping the intercooler’s capacity by one gallon. Then they ported and polished the heads, upgraded the valves, valve springs and injectors. There’s a new cam, too, as well as 1 7/8-inch stainless exhaust headers feeding into high-flow catalytic converters then into larger three-inch pipes. Finally, they remapped the ECU. The results are… total lunacy.

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