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Twin Peaks - Autocar reviews the BMW M5
15.06.2005 |
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Just imagine that this story is being pitched as the next Hollywood blockbuster movie. The catch line might go something like this: BMW M5 versus Ferrari F430; can you tell which one's the little guy? That's when the movie's money men might turn around and ask of their director: 'Give us more story, Francis. We need more meat on the bone before we can commit to the sort of budget you're wanting.'
Mr Coppola's reply might go something like this. 'Think about it, schmucks, the BM-dubya costs half as much as the ayetallion stallion yet has more power, twice as many seats, five times the space we need for our golf clubs and almost as much image, albeit in a subtle, Tim Robbinsy kinda way.
'Surely that means it's twice as good as the car you'd think would walk away with it?'
In the end it was just too hard to resist. The more we thought about pairing and comparing this most unlikely of duos, the more it appealed. So off we went to Hollywood - sorry, Wales - aboard arguably the two most relevant and desirable performance cars of the modern era.
I drove the M5 first because somehow, until this story took place, I'd missed out on driving BMW's seminal new wonder-saloon. I'd read all about it, naturally, and I'd been due to attend the international launch of the car way back in August last year.
But for one reason and another it never quite happened for me and the M5 last year, and having owned a pristine example of the previous-generation model for a year I was, shall we say, keen to find out what it was like. Everyone had said it was rather good, especially its 500bhp V10 engine, seven-speed sequential gearbox and circa 200mph potential.
On the other hand, I had driven the F430 - whereas not a lot of other people on the mag had. And I knew that to get within even one of the F430's nine yards of speed and raw spirit, the M5 would need to be an awful lot better than good. So you could say I had 'one of those moments' when, finally, I fired up the BMW and began driving it down the M4 towards Wales. With a Ferrari F430 in the mirror.
To begin with I found it quite a confusing machine to get used to, the M5. There is so much tech to digest, so many buttons for this, switches for that, screens for heaven knows what, that you can't help but feel a mite intimidated on first acquaintance. And maybe even a teeny bit redundant. I mean, what use could a mere human be in a machine that can change its damper settings automatically, dip its oil all by itself, tell you what the weather is like in Fiji and warm itself up for you on a freezing cold morning?
But then, gradually, as you learn the car and you spend more time interacting with its various electronic addenda, the more fundamental side of its character starts to seep through. And you realise right about then that the tech is actually there to help, not hinder - from the iDrive system to the M button on the steering wheel, which alters all the car's settings to whatever pre-selected 'maximum attack' positions you have chosen within the main menu. Only then do you twig that without its 22nd-century personality, the M5 wouldn't be half the car it is.
At its heart, however, it is still an unadulterated thug of a performance saloon - and also just an impossibly fast, exciting car to drive. I learned this pretty much the instant we peeled off the M4, found a clear and empty stretch of dual carriageway and I introduced the back of the accelerator to the carpet for a while. At idle the M5's V10 sounds, I kid you not, exactly like a contemporary turbodiesel - very nasty indeed. And even on the motorway at 2500rpm in seventh (yes, it has seven gears; not five or six or four; seven, which is one more than the Ferrari, by the way) the workings of the engine are so muted, so smooth, that there's no way you could detect how potent it might turn out to be.
What happened on that dual carriageway I will not forget for a very long time. It went, if I can remember correctly because to be honest it was all a bit of a blur, something like this: I pressed the M-drive button on the wheel, which at a stroke set the engine to its full 500bhp brew (normally it has 400bhp, pah), the electronic dampers to the hardest of their three settings, throttle to its snappiest response mode, the gear change to its most aggressive shift sequence and even the seats to their most hip-hugging position. Then I looked in the mirror, saw the grin on the Ferrari driver's face, and hit the throttle. Hard, in second gear.
In true clichéd style the back of my head, indeed the back of my whole torso, recoiled and wound itself deep into the front of the seat. The hairs on the backs of my hands went stiff when the full range of abilities of the M5's V10 engine and its astonishing transmission became apparent.
At 3000rpm it delivered the kind of haymaker to the kidneys that only a true blue supercar or a four-day booze binge can, and I was amazed that the rear tyres didn't simply light up. Instead, the M5 just went; no wheelspin, no dramatics from the tail whatsoever, despite there being a slight curve in the road. Within three seconds it had put 10 yards between itself and the howling, screaming, rapidly disappearing Ferrari.
And the gap, I'm not joking, merely grew as the next few seconds unfolded. At 5000rpm the timbre of the M5's V10 altered, became even harder edged, and if anything the acceleration got stronger as it closed in on its 6100rpm torque peak. Then at 6500rpm it happened again, only with more vigour and even more humiliating results as far as the Ferrari was concerned.
Up until about 3000rpm I'd been able to hear the ripping machinations of the F430 behind, but above 5000rpm all I could hear was the thundering, industrial, oddly off-beat rumble of the M5's V10, vapourising time and space and anything else it could lock onto before thumping up into the next gear and doing it all again.
Ah yes, the gearchange. This, without doubt, is one of the M5's most impressive features, and to discover why you only need to experience once what happens when you flick the upshift paddle at 8100rpm with the transmission in its most aggressive shift mode. For a start you know you could never, ever, change gear as fast as this manually. Second, the corresponding whumpf from the diff when the clutch disengages may be brutal almost to the point of tears but it doesn't half make it feel as if you're motoring now, baby. Third, it is faultless and perfect and unbeatable each and every time you use it, ie miles sharper than any human in terms of consistency. And fourth, it makes the Ferrari's gearchange, itself way better than most other paddle-shift gearboxes, seem slow, clumsy, and unrefined. Not to mention short of actual gears to the tune of one.
The overall result is that the M5, on its first and most important test against arguably the greatest all-round sports car in the universe right now, chewed up and spat its competition out into the gutter. By the time we backed off on that dual carriageway it was tens of yards in front of the Ferrari and still going away. I'm not sure who was more shocked, me or my colleague in the F430. We stopped in the first lay-by to make sure neither of us had been seeing things. The M5, we concluded, with its greater motorway refinement, two extra seats, bigger boot, higher goodie count, £60,000-lower asking price and, now, its conclusively greater straight-line performance, well, it was already two sets up and looking pretty much unbeatable in the third.
And the real surprise, the one we genuinely had no idea about (because you just wouldn't), was yet to come. It occurred when we reached the quieter, more undulating and certainly more sports-car orientated roads we'd been heading towards all along. These roads were the reason we'd gone to Wales in the first place. They are the sort of roads you simply don't find any more within 100 miles of our offices in West London. And they are the sort of roads on which an F430, of all cars, should reach its zenith.
And it did. But on each occasion the M5, like some kind of automated poker player, would simply call the F430 and then raise it by whatever was required to grip that bit harder, compose itself that much better and, ultimately, travel that much faster across the ground. You think I'm making this up? You need to drive an M5 over a beautiful moorland road with crests and dips and off-camber twists with a Ferrari F430 on your tail. And when you get to the end of that road and the Ferrari is nowhere in sight, and I mean nowhere, you'll realise.
Not how good a driver you are - because the bloke in the Ferrari, you know, is just as old and just as bold as you are. You'd realise, instead, what an incredible piece of engineering the new M5 truly is. How unbelievably composed it is considering its weight, how incisively it steers, how brilliantly it stops; how hard it grips, how well it changes gear; how crisply it responds to the throttle, how cleanly it changes direction. How sensational it is, full stop.
So I had to try the Ferrari over the same road and with the same person now driving the M5, just to make sure we weren't going mad. To make sure, also, that we hadn't missed something about the F430 on a previous occasion - or more to the point I hadn't missed, because it was me who'd eulogised about the car on its launch at the end of last summer.
But of course you never just leap into a Ferrari, turn the key (or prod the starter button in this instance) and go. Not for the first few times at any rate. You open the door, ease yourself aboard being careful not to scuff any of that beautiful red leather, take a deep lungful of air and then smell that inimitable smell, a wondrous mix of hide and maybe the faintest whiff of hand-crafted sweat that only a brand new Ferrari seems to exude. No matter how many times you experience it, climbing into a Ferrari is always special. Some might even call it a priceless experience, and I guess that's one of the key reasons we're here, comparing these two cars in the first place; to try to somehow qualify that most of difficult words - priceless.
First surprise in the F430 was that it didn't sound as dramatic as the one I'd driven in Italy. The start-up software didn't provide the same violent burst of revs when I hit the starter button, and when I prodded the throttle a few times (as you do) the noise and the response didn't seem so immediate.
The lack of decibels has a simple explanation: on right-hand-drive F430s you don't hear the same intake suck as you do on left-hookers, because the guts of the intake system are on the left of the engine bay. The relative lack of response was harder to fathom. Are UK cars fitted with different throttle software, I began to wonder, or was that original left-hand-drive launch car just an 'unusually good' example?
Surprise number two came as I drove away and realised pretty much immediately that the F430 has nothing like as much low- and mid-range torque as the BMW. I thought Maranello had all but eradicated this hole in the output curve of its V8 engine during the transition from 360M to F430, but beside the M5 the Ferrari feels, not gutless, but ever so slightly weedy below 5000rpm. Above this, yes, it really starts to let rip - but by then an M5 will be long gone. And so it proved.
Halfway along our road I'd already become aware of a whole range of very wonderful things about the Ferrari, none of which the M5 had any real answer for: its deliciously accurate steering, its heroically feelsome and powerful brakes, its gorgeous cabin and, of course, the noise it makes over the final 3000rpm, which is utterly seductive, not to mention very, very loud. Things you might well describe as being 'priceless'. But beneath this sheen there was a doubt, not so much a single flaw but more a significant overall issue that knawed right into the centre of the F430's appeal.
It was this: no matter how hard I tried, or how fast I drove it, or how connected or good or emotional it felt while I was doing so, I still couldn't drop the bloke in the BMW behind.
Okay, I can hear what all you so-called Tifosi and Ferrari aficionados are no doubt screaming right now; that Ferraris are about an awful lot more than pure speed, and in any case if you want to go really, really fast then buy a Caterham or a Radical or a motorbike. But come on; don't tell me someone who's happy to spray £130,000 in the direction of an F430, complete with carbon brakes and sports interior as this particular example was, will be happy to be blown off the road by a BMW. With four people on board. And a bootful of luggage. No, I don't reckon they will be either.
Make no mistake; the F430 is still one of the greatest sports cars of our time, and indeed of all time. But quite where that puts the new M5 is difficult to imagine. From another world is the best that I can do.
Roll credits, cue music, the end.
By Steve Sutcliffe (Autocar)