Tim Allen Design Cadillac DeVille DTSi

Tim Allen Design Cadillac DeVille DTSi Tim Allen Design Cadillac DeVille DTSi
Specialty File

At Waterford Hills racetrack, it's easy to find comedian Tim Allen. Look for the ever-moving swarm: the TV cameras, the makeup men, the hangers-on, the "edgers," the guys pointing their disposable cameras. As Allen slips into the track's men's room, the swarm hovers expectantly at the entrance, awaiting a flush and a rustle of paper towels. The swarm is not embarrassed. The swarm is patient.

Wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and purple-tinted sunglasses, this slim, surprisingly small man emerges from the pit-lane biffy. His forearms ripple with sinew and veins, as if he hoists weights.

Tim Allen faces the swarm, clicks his heels, and suddenly assumes a storm trooper's persona: "Vell, ze story ees zat I call ziss zilver-haired Chermin chentleman sigs monz ago, yah?" he announces. "'Herr Beitzel,' I zay to him, 'vee need ziss vast DeFille right avay, yah?'"

The swarm ruptures itself laughing.

"Herr Beitzel" is Jeffrey Beitzel, president of Wheel to Wheel, a prototype assembler in Troy, Michigan. Beitzel recently built six Seville STSi pace cars for Cadillac's Le Mans effort. Which means that building a hot-rod DeVille commissioned by TV celebrity Allen was a no-brainer. The hardware already existed. Well, it existed after Beitzel spent $120 grand.

"I looked at some other sedans [an Olds Aurora and a Lexus IS300] to modify," Allen says, "but I kept coming back to the DeVille. Every time I caught this thing from a rear three-quarter view, I said to myself [now affecting a Walter Brennan voice], Gotta have this, all two tons of it."

Cadillac was delighted to oblige, assigning GM's in-house hot rodder, Jon Moss, to oversee Beitzel's ministrations.

When it came to modifying the DTS's suspension, Moss knew immediately what he wanted: higher-rate front and rear springs, a 30mm solid front anti-roll bar, beefier polyurethane bushings, a brace between the front strut towers, and a one-inch reduction in ride height. He slapped some 18-inch Goodyear Eagle F1s atop eight-inch-wide Konig wheels, each sprayed to match the car's Argentanium Silver paint -- same as the Evoq show car's. And the front brakes were replaced by four-piston Brembos on 14-inch vented, cross-drilled rotors.

Beitzel, meanwhile, busied himself with the DeVille's Northstar V-8, determined to compromise neither its idle nor its broad power band. He thus opted to retain a stock displacement and to eschew blowers. Instead, the cylinder heads received an expensive five-angle valve job and a thorough porting and polishing. A larger, straighter fresh-air inlet was fitted. Stainless-steel headers preceded a sewer-size Corsa exhaust with a trick crossover. Still, most of the newfound power derived from custom pistons that bumped the compression two points, to 12.0 to 1. The upshot was 398 horsepower at 6400 rpm -- a 98-hp increase.

Allen slides into his DeVille and starts it for the first time, revving the V-8 like a kid. The exhaust is loud and blatty, like that of a Mustang GT with glass packs. "You think it sounds okay?" he asks, not so sure himself. The rumpety-rumpety deep-bass idle -- about all that Allen will hear once he ships the car to his L.A. home -- seems to emanate from far more than 4.6 liters.

While Moss and Beitzel were applying the finishing touches in Michigan, the actor was inventing a company called Tim Allen Design, or TAD, "to create my own prototypes," he explains. "You know, the one-offs, the car-show stuff, the cars I loved as a kid." It was TAD that specified this DeVille's subtly modified exterior: carbon-fiber rocker sills, four stubby chrome exhaust tips, a rear fascia narrowed to accommodate only U.S. license plates, and a brushed-aluminum grille. The grille, in fact, has been widened, eliminating the stock body-colored "eyebrows" originally flanking it, and the gaping hole occasioned by the night-vision camera is now filled with an ornamental Cadillac wreath and crest.