The fancy-pants Sierra turns out to be a heavy-duty hot rod.Numbers are an obsession in the auto industry. Corporate suits worry about build costs, profit margins, and sales volumes; sports-car fans spend more time watching horsepower counts, acceleration times, and top speeds. But heavy-duty truck enthusiasts live and die by numbers, perhaps more than any other segment of the automotive sphere.
To that end, the 2011 GMC Sierra heavy duty—along with its Chevrolet Silverado twin—sees a couple of its key numbers swell to 6635 and 21,700. Those are the highest payload and trailer-weight capacities of the GM HD trucks; the totals for the 2500 truck tested here are 2631 and 16,800 pounds, respectively. But when we finished putting this GMC Sierra Denali 2500 through its paces, it wasn’t these digits that had our spreadsheets smoking.
Quick for a Big Guy
Indeed, a thoroughly overhauled Duramax turbo-diesel V-8 supplies the first pair of staggering numbers: 397 and 765. Those are the 6.6-liter engine’s respective horsepower and torque counts, the former peaking at 3000 rpm and the latter at 1600. Those two figures delivered the digits that simply blew us away—7.3 and 15.7, as in stopwatch ticks to 60 mph and through the quarter-mile, the latter feat occurring at 89 mph. What we have here is a 7560-pound truck that’s quicker than the first Chevy Camaro we ever tested and capable of hauling most of one in the bed or towing four behind it on a trailer.
Read More: http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/car/10q3/2011_gmc_sierra_hd_2500_denali_4x4_diesel-short_take_road_test
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