Well, the put-up or shut-up moment has now passed for 77-year-old Lutz and, well, he didn't win. He posted a quite respectable 2:56:321. That was enough to blow away the privately owned BMW M5 (3:05:395) but the range of track-driving experience here today is huge. So we hesitate to read too much into those relative times.

Lutz was about 7 seconds behind GM development engineer and Nurburgring veteran, Aaron Link. He was about 5 seconds slower than the one early CTS-V driven by journalist Jack Baruth. Lutz also trailed the BMW M3 by about 5.5 seconds.

Lutz was driving a CTS-V with an automatic. Link drove a CTS-V with a manual transmission.