A recent report in Car and Driver says that GM is already at work on a new rear-wheel drive flagship sedan for the Cadillac brand. This at the behest of its new global product planner, one Mr. Ed Whitacre, who also happens to be the CEO. The plan supposedly involves using a stretched version of the Sigma platform currently used for the CTS.

Now this sounds great and all, and Cadillac would surely benefit from such a vehicle, but really, a flagship? Now?

Granted, there's never really a great time to spend a ton of money on a car that's more about image than profit. It's sort of a leap of establishment that has to be prefabricated when various other factors are in place. And sure, GM is doing a bit better than last year, but we can think of about a dozen other vehicles that are probably more important to its success right now than an $80,000 Cadillac.

It's usually true that when boys race cars, boys cheat. Women probably do too. And when nobody is found to be cheating, it's usually because they haven't yet been caught.

That's especially true when the vehicles to be raced are "stock" vehicles. To try to weed out any cheaters, General Motors has brought a Hungarian-American man by the study of Csaba Csere. Sound familiar? That's right. He's the long-time Editor in Chief of a little car entrepot called Car and Driver, now retired.

As the guest of General Motors (although not a paid one, Csere hastens to point out), he's here to crawl around the competitor cars to see if something is totally amiss. It's a pretty relaxed inspection though as Csere points out there's no way if he can tell whether someone has changed their brake pads to more track-worthy pieces. Note to competitors: You should swap out your brake pads now.

So far, no cheaters have been identified.

Coupe-like performance and a stronger structure—and it looks fantastic, too.

We usually assess convertibles in terms of structural rigidity, the square root of all vehicle dynamics. Rubbery bones don’t enhance transient response, and there’s the disconcerting phenomenon of dashboard and steering column jiggling to the beat of slightly different sambas.

But that’s not the biggest concern of a team convertibilizing a fastback coupe. They’re wondering whether their baby will be seductive. Makes sense, right? After all, a guy surveying the traffic at a hookup bar isn’t thinking about structural rigidity (other than his own).

Keep Reading: 2010 Nissan 370Z Touring Roadster – Short Take Road Test

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Audi vs. Italy: A German supercar with an Italian heart travels to Italy to claim its birthright.

Read: 2010 Audi R8 5.2 V10 FSI Quattro vs. 2009 Ferrari 430 Scuderia – Comparison Test

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Rough rider: After 13 months with Lexus’s lusty M3 fighter, we have just one suggestion: Fix the ride!

Every so often, our long-term fleet acquires a special kind of car. Not a 10Best winner. Not a comparison-test winner. Rather, a car that changes its segment or signals a immoderate shift in its maker’s attitude. The IS F does both. It’s a Lexus with true enthusiast credentials. This is roughly equivalent to saying it’s a granny who writes in regularly to Penthouse Forum.

The F stands apart from Lexus’s sporty IS line of cars with its large fender flares, 19-inch BBS wheels with matching summer-only tires, and a hood with a serious power bulge. Beneath that bulge resides an immensely powerful 5.0-liter, direct- and port-injected V-8 that delivers 416 horsepower through a slick eight-speed automatic. This illusion setup is accompanied by a thunderous exhaust soundtrack.

Keep Reading: 2008 Lexus IS F – Long-Term Road Test

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