GM’s Bob Lutz Is Faster than Bloggers

A zany little sideshow has been building in carland over the past month and a half. Back in early September, General Motors’ (MTLQQ) un-retired marketing boss, Bob Lutz, challenged all comers in an unmodified, production sedan to take on a Cadillac CTS-V, driven by him. It was all part of GM’s “May the Best Car Win” campaign. According to some contacts I spoke with at GM, Jalopnik—Gawker Media’s car blog and an outfit I worked for for a while back in 2008—immediately took up the gauntlet. More than a hundred applications later, Lutz and his Caddy wound up today at a track in New York, running timed laps against five finalists. (There was no car-on-car racing involved.)

It’s worth noting that Lutz is 77 years old. This fact wasn’t lost on the GM or Cadillac representatives I spoke with, who stressed that Lutz, at one time a competitive racer (well, 30 years ago), knew what he was doing and had put in some practice, but wasn’t expecting to turn the fastest lap. Overall, concern about putting a man who’s been the voice of the company for years and who’s arguably its most important executive (sorry, Fritz Henderson) behind the wheel of a 550-plus horsepower car to go as fast as possible in a racing venue seemed present but muted.

Concern among makers of luxury sedans wasn’t so muted. Jalopnik initially wanted to borrow a car from Mercedes, but it backed out, as did Jaguar later. (Jalopnik’s road test editor, Wes Siler, eventually took out a Mitsubishi Evo X MR, which gives up quite a bit of horsepower to the CTS-V.) You really can’t blame them—this was a great, Lutzian PR stunt, so even if, say, Jaguar had fronted a car, they still would have been putting themselves up against a silver-haired fox pushing 80. No winning that contest. This is the thing about Lutz: he does old better than anyone. He does old so well that it should be closely studied by the young.

Cadillac tweeted the race and the results. Looks like the CTS-V did best all challengers, including Jalopnik (Siler may have over-thought the course a bit) by a goodly margin. Lutz didn’t turn the fastest lap, but he did get around in under 3 minutes, and the only non-Caddy entrant in the top seven was a BMW M3. The best time belonged to John Heinricy, a retired GM test driver who had already taken the CTS-V around Germany’s Nurburgring in less than eight minutes (that’s fast).

So what does this all mean, exactly? Well, this is the best example yet of GM using something other than tried-and-true print and television spots, along with events and auto shows, to market its cars. By happily tangling with the blogosphere, it got free and steady, in fact obsessive, promotion of the race. It revved up its Twitter presence and flooded Cadillac’s Facebook page (which featured video, plus an emblematic photo of Lutz standing next to a red CTS-V, holding his racing helmet like the, um, fighter pilot he used to be). At the center of it all was a man some 12 years past the typical retirement age, still proclaiming the greatness of his company’s cars in a swaggering and borderline arrogant manner. And then backing it up!

There’s a slightly mind-bending marketing synergy in all this that should compel us all to conclude that, bankruptcy or not, “Government Motors” or something re-invented, GM and Cadillac had a pretty good day.

Unfortunately, I can’t post any of GM’s video yet, but here’s some of the CTS-V in action, provided by Edmunds.com: