2006 Trailblazer SS

"Sporty truck," an oxymoron in the old days that later meant "too harsh and not useful," has now matured into this: a sport/utility that's fun to drive, comfortable as a daily driver, and still able to tow and haul stuff.

Performance guru John Heinricy and platform maven Tom Wallace have done a lot with the GMT-360, though its five-year-old body-on-frame platform limits its potential refinement. Front and rear shocks and springs are beefed up with SS-specific valving for the Bilsteins. The front stabilizer bar is 2 mm thicker, to 36, and the 24mm rear bar remains the same. Tires are beefy Goodyear Eagle RS-A P255/50R20s on handsome six-spoke polished flangeless wheels.

Heinricy and Wallace mentioned in our July cover story that the most powerful new Chevy Super Sport would be well balanced--and it is. On bumpy roads, the TrailBlazer SS is firm, but not jarring, with the type of suspension tuning associated with BMW. Heinricy developed the SS around the Nuerburgring's Nordschleife. While GM seems to have fallen in love with the place (decades after the engineers at BMW did) to the point where it's in danger of appearing as a marketing gimmick, it works.

Around the challenging road course at GM's Milford Proving Ground (nicknamed the Lutzring, after you-know-who), the TrailBlazer SS AWD rotates predictably with its stability control shut off. There's compliance, but not enough to make you worry about where to place your left knee in a right-hand turn. The rear-drive model is better at the track, with more potential for throttle-steer. The AWD overcooks its tires, but its 0.83g skidpad number is good for a car, let alone for a truck. A one-inch ride height reduction (versus the standard TrailBlazer's) helps.

The heart of this sport/utility is the LS2 6.0-liter small-block V-8, replacing the standard TrailBlazer V-8's 300-horse, 5.3-liter. In the TrailBlazer SS, the LS2 makes 395 horsepower (up from numbers generated for our July cover story) and 400 pound-feet of torque. Our rear-drive test truck's 5.6-second 0-to-60-mph time is 1.9 seconds quicker than GM's own time for the 5.3-liter TrailBlazer and beats the 7.7 seconds we recorded for the inline-six TrailBlazer in late 2001. In the quarter, our 14.2 seconds at 98 mph beat the 5.3's 15.9-second time, but was 0.3 second slower than GM's own prediction for the TrailBlazer SS.