BMW added its latest control regime for driving modes (which is marshalled via a grid-style touchscreen menu for its various suspension, steering, engine, driveline and electronic governance settings) as part of the M5’s mid-life facelift in 2020.
There’s a lot of choice to contend with among all of the options for configuration, needless to say. But your chances of finding and accessing particular combinations of settings that are to your taste, and that seem to prepare the car ideally for particular types of roads, weather conditions or styles of driving, are boosted enormously by BMW’s ‘M1’ and ‘M2’ toggle switches on the steering wheel hub.
You use these not only to save particular combinations of settings (with one long press), but also to dial them back up again really quickly and easily when you need it (with two short presses). And being able to do that feels like gradually bringing to heel the complexity of the car’s driving experience, and refining the character you want from the car, in a way that few of BMW’s rivals have yet mastered.
It helps, of course, that there is simply more to enjoy about this M5 than there has been about its F90 predecessor models. The CS’s suspension specification conjures much smoother and more settled vertical body control for it than a regular M5 Competition has.
Despite having less wheel travel than other M5s, the CS rides with more compliance and dexterity over bumps when you leave the dampers in their softest setting, staying level and composed over B-roads that would have made the regular car an excitable, hyperactive tussle.