History of the BMW M5, July 2019

Had a great couple of days driving down the to West Country in the E28 in convoy with Ariel in his beautiful E34 M5 Nurburging Edition on our way to film with LoveCars for their piece about the History of the M5 with Tiff Needell

The LoveCars crew and Tiff were all a great laugh on the day, and provided fantastic catering by way of some water, Wine Gums and Subway ;-), we learned that filming involves a lot of standing around, too.

There was one of each generation of M5 on hand, the E39, E60 & F10 were all BMW Heritage Fleet cars and the F90 was from BMW's Press Fleet. I managed to have a drive in all the models I'd not driven before, the E34 felt very similar to my E28 apart from lighter steering and less roll, the E39 I've spent plenty of time in previously and adore so I jumped into the V10 screamer that is the E60. Two lengths of the airfield and the E60 was off my list of wanted cars! This one had covered just 7700 miles and the dash was lit up like a Christmas tree, but worse than that? That bloody SMG gearbox. FFS, what did they do??? It was absolutely woeful, slow, jerky and unrefined. A manual 'box would have transformed this car.

Then I had a go in the F90 Competition, obviously I instantly found how to engage rear-wheel-drive mode and turned everything to maximum attack mode with no safety nets. I was amazed at how well the car still put down its 616bhp and 553lb.ft of torque through its rear tyres but more impressive was its turn-in response, for a two-tonne car, it was fantastic and there was very little body roll, too.

Of course with this much grunt, it wasn't difficult to unstick the big 295-section rear tyres but, with the responsiveness of the chassis, it felt so controlled once slipping sideways that you felt you could carry on sliding until the fuel tank run dry or more likely, the rear tyres exploded! What a fantastic machine and a worthy addition to the M5 bloodline.

Can't wait to see what LoveCars do with all the footage and photos they gathered during the day, but I'm sure my E28 will be the star of the show!!

Bungle