Chevy TrailBlazer SS Prototype

Midsize-truck vehicle line executive Tom Wallace missed out on all the fun. He had to stay in the States to work on the Hummer H3 and Saab 9-7x and let high-performance operations director John Heinricy fly off to Germany's storied Nürburgring to tweak the TrailBlazer SS.

"It's the most challenging track I've ever been on," says Heinricy, "and I don't think there's a more challenging one in the world. If you want to develop the dynamics of a vehicle that can handle any situation, you're going to find it at the Nürburgring. It has huge elevation changes, on- or off-camber turns; they're going in an odd direction after the top of a hill. If you can develop a vehicle to behave well at the Nürburgring circuit, running at full-tilt, you've pretty much covered anything I've ever seen on any public road."

Seventy percent of how a new car-or in this case, truck-feels generally is baked into the design. The rest is tweaked and tuned on such road circuits: alignment specifications, shocks, springs, anti-roll bars, bushings, body mounts. "And that's typical of what you do at the 'Ring," Heinricy says.

He claims he adjusted the brake balance after trail-braking at the notoriously tough circuit and tuned the transmission for better downshifts and upshifts in and out of turns. "In some cases," he says, "you might see something you want to change to handle something like the Nürburgring, but we didn't find that necessary with the TrailBlazer."

European manufacturers have conducted development programs at the 'Ring for decades. Does calibrating a suspension or brake system here automatically make it better? Not unless the engineers involved know what to do with the assembled data-seat of the pants and that captured by computer. But if the handling prowess displayed by cars like the Cadillac CTS-v and the C6 Corvette is any indication, the many twists, turns, and undulations of the Nordschleife aren't at all lost on this band of car geeks from GM.