2019 M5 COMPETITION A PRACTICAL PERFORMER
Few cars deliver serious performance and surprising civility quite as well as the BMW M5
Since 1988, the BMW M5 has been one of the hottest super sedans available. It’s a full-on family sedan yet kicks serious butt at the race track and can be anything in between. Few cars deliver quite as well on polar opposites.
The latest version is now offered with the Competition badge, applied to BMW’s high-performance cars as a standalone model. The M2 Competition arrived to great fanfare last year, and the M5 Competition is next. It gets more power, better handling and bigger brakes — and all this over and above the regular M5, which is no slouch.
The work starts under the hood, where the 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 has been reworked to produce 617 horsepower, which is up 17. The torque output remains the same, at 553 pound-feet, but it stays in the game over a broader range. In the end, the punchy V8 has a response that’s about as instant as instant gets. It also sounds the part; in stealth mode, the quad exhaust pipes burble mildly, but hit the loud button and they shout to the world.
The engine works with an eight-speed transmission and BMW’s xDrive all-wheel-drive system. How it works varies and can be set by the driver. In normal mode, the system spits the power more or less evenly. This is the Family mode and the best setting for everyday driving. Sport mode sends more power rearward and allows the tail to be drifted, but the electronic traction nanny is working in the background and steps in before things go pear-shaped. Then there’s the rear-driveonly mode, which is best saved for a track day, as it allows the tail to hang out in one long lurid drift; it can be done at will and, frankly, at one’s peril. If you do overcook things, there is absolutely no safety net whatsoever! But, you know, that’s what the M5 is all about : living on the edge.
The M5 Competition is a year-round proposition. In the past, rear-drive M5s had to be driven as if there was an egg between your foot and the gas pedal — breathe too hard and it went seriously sideways and usually at the worst possible time. That’s not the case anymore — the all-wheel advantage and proper winter tires made it an almost unstoppable winter ride.
All systems, from the engine and transmission to the suspension, steering and xDrive with its Active M rear differential, can be tweaked through the drive mode selector. Picking Sport+ across the board saw the M5 Competition warp from rest to 100 km/h in 3.3 seconds, which is world class. However, it’s the mid-range where the M5 truly excels. My thumb was not fast enough to clock the 80-to-120 passing time accurately. Let’s just say it lies around 2.1 seconds.
The work continues with the suspension. The chassis gets a seven-millimetre drop in ride height, stiffer springs and firmer adaptive damping, along with increased front camber and a modified antiroll bar at the back. The result is a drive that remains flatter than gravy on a plate, even when the M5 Competition is pushed toward its extraordinary limits. Factor in the razor sharp steering with its near-perfect feedback and there has not been a faster car through my favourite set of sweeping curves to date.
Now, if you’ve got 617 stallions under the hood, you’d better have strong reins to slow the beggars down. The oversized composite rotors with six-piston front calipers bring exceptional stopping power each and every time they are called upon. The good news is they work, even when hammered continually, without running headlong into the dreaded wall of fade.
The rest of the M5 Competition is much like any other 5 Series, with iDrive infotainment and its 10.2-inch touch screen, a roomy back seat, and an accommodating 530-L trunk. The key differences are the superb 20-way front seats and a chunky steering wheel with two very special buttons. The M1 and M2 buttons allow the driver to store two sets of drive characteristics. The simple rule of thumb is to have everything in efficient or comfort modes for everyday driving. Select Sport for all facets and store them in M1, and then set everything to Sport+ and keep that information in M2. Now accessing one of the M5’s multiple personalities is just a button push away.
This BMW M5 Competition is a complete package. It is a full-on family ride that does not feel temperamental when forced to trundle down to pick up groceries, yet it’s also a dynamic track demon that does not have to take a back seat too many (if any) in that environment. As such it remains, at least for me, the benchmark by which all other super-sedans must be judged.