Nothing says "I've still got sack" like a 100-foot burnout in a supercharged, pushrod-powered American wagon loaded with a toddler, a stroller, a case of Huggies pull-ups and 2 gallons of organic reduced-fat milk. This, friends, is the 2011 Cadillac CTS-V Wagon. It's a machine built for the unemasculated American male who still makes a nod to utility. And we want one. Badly.

Honestly, we're not certain who the customers are for Cadillac's wild crossbreed of speed and function. The investment banker family man with the need to carry the occasional ladder, maybe? Or, perhaps, the successful mortgage broker whose midlife crisis involves wholesome burnouts with two kids and a dog in the back?

We don't know. And, frankly, neither does Cadillac. Best of all, it doesn't really matter. Why? Because Cadillac only has to sell 37 CTS-V wagons — the third V-series car in the CTS line — to break even on the project.

And if that's not a testament to economies of scale, we don't know what is.

Wagoning the CTS-V
Talk to Don Butler, vice president of Cadillac marketing, and you begin to get an idea why this is the case. "There's not a lot different on the wagon," Butler says. "Really, it was just a matter of making certain the wagon could live up to the standard of V-branded products."

We can verify that it does. Our mother-in-law nearly slapped us silly the first time we ran the big Caddy up on the torque converter, released the brake and pinned her freshly styled locks into the leather headrests. Wagons, at least in her day, never performed such feats.

But the 2011 Cadillac CTS-V Wagon is happy to oblige. After all, it's endowed with all the trickery of other Cadillac V cars — supercharging, two-mode magnetic ride control suspension, Brembo brakes and huge, sticky Michelins. Sure, there were small compromises to keep the budget down — like the fact that this car shares its rear fascia and exhaust outlets with the standard CTS Sport Wagon while other V products get proprietary rear bumpers and exhaust outlets. But the wagon's only real compromises come in the form of additional weight and reduced rigidity.

You Can't Tell
According to Ed Piatek, CTS-V Wagon program engineering manager, the wagon is 8 percent less rigid than the sedan in bending rigidity and 3.8 percent less rigid than the sedan in torsional rigidity. However, it speaks highly of the wagon's body structure that the development team didn't feel the need to add any additional bracing over that of the standard CTS Sport Wagon.

Thanks to a heavier body structure and glass, the 2011 Cadillac CTS-V Wagon is about 154 pounds heavier than the sedan, depending on equipment. This brought the total weight of our tester to 4,485 pounds.

We'll admit to not having back-to-back drives in both the sedan and wagon, but if you're not in this game for ultimate performance, then those differences matter little. This is a fast, fun machine that just happens to offer real utility in addition to its stunning speed.

And About That Speed...
Of course, under the wagon's hood resides the same 556-horsepower 6.2-liter supercharged V8 we're now accustomed to seeing in all über-quick Cadillacs. Our test car was fitted with the six-speed automatic transmission with steering-wheel-mounted shift buttons. And if you want an exceptionally rare machine, the wagon is available with a six-speed manual transmission.

But like all CTS-Vs, this one plain stomps when it's asked to. It banged out a 12.7-second quarter-mile pass at 113.4 mph. That's 0.3 second and 1 mph off the pace of the last CTS-V Sedan we tested. Sixty miles per hour arrives in 4.7 seconds (4.4 seconds with a 1-foot rollout like at a drag strip). Again, a few clicks off the pace of the sedan (4.4 seconds), but not a deal-breaker — at least not for us.