BMW M5 Competition 2020 UK first drive

It’s a lot to take in, I realise. But the significant thing here may be that BMW’s never before sought to filter out, wrap up or conceal any of that complication. It has often come in for criticism as a result. Might they finally be getting it, though? Be making life just a little bit simpler for the driver, and configuring the car at least a little bit on his behalf? These are certainly only the most embryonic of signs if so – but they’re good ones.

Most of the car’s driving experience is as it was. The M5 remains one of the most dynamically ambitious performance cars of its kind. Even though driver-configurable four-wheel drive systems are now pretty common in the super saloon niche, few cars like this attempt such versatility. The M5 tries to be as taut, agile and playful as a one-tonne sports car in one moment and as fast as a supercar the next, while offering everything against that backdrop of high-speed stability and real-world touring comfort on which the lumpiest German autobahn specials have been trading for decades. And judged strictly objectively, it succeeds really well at much of that stuff. I’m not sure an Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, probably still the most sports-car-like of all performance saloons, attempts to cover so much ground.

The M5’s engine and drivetrain are unchanged, and they make for an enormously fast and potent saloon. Technically a Mercedes E63 S will give you more torque, but I’d be deeply suspicious of anyone who said they could use any more of it on UK roads. The V8 has huge, elasticky-feeling mid-range reserves and responds keenly even to smaller changes in pedal position. It also covers the last 2000rpm of its crankspeed up to the 7200rpm redline really freely for turbocharged engine.

The car’s automatic gearbox can be quite aggressive with its engagement in the sportier driving modes, surprising you sometimes when it’s shifting by itself. It’ll almost always deliver a downshift in manual mode when you ask for it, though – and you can almost always choose a comfier operating setting if it’ s getting spiky or unsettling. There are rather a lot of those operating settings, after all.

My only lingering disappointment was with the way that engine sounds. It’s got a digitally synthesized audible character that’s still too smooth and anodyne to trick your ear. It doesn’t seem detailed enough, and doesn’t adapt nearly enough to changes in throttle load, to sound like authentic V8 rumble.

But, while the M5’s powertrain has been carried over pretty much unchanged, its suspension specification certainly hasn’t. New adaptive dampers feature as standard, with a set of manually adjustable coilovers available through the BMW M Performance catalogue that drop your car between 5- and 20mm closer to the Tarmac than the adaptive setup. The M Division’s ‘compound’ lightweight brakes feature as standard and its carbon-ceramics are optional, the latter being set off by those eye-catching gold calipers and worth a combined 23kg of unsprung mass across all four corners of the car.

The new adaptive suspension setup, as fitted to our test car, seems to have calmed down the car’s formerly grabby, hardcore ride a little bit. BMW claims a worthwhile improvement to the way the car deals with small and medium-sized inputs, and reasonably so. I don’t think I’d have chosen to drive the last version of this car with the dampers set to anything other than ‘comfort’ anywhere but on a circuit; and it would have needed to be a pretty smooth circuit at that.

This new one might actually have a better, more level and settled cross-country ride with its suspension set to ‘sport’, although there’s certainly still a time and a place for ‘comfort’ around town. Although the secondary ride is still quite abrupt and percussive, the suspension deals with the majority of inputs that a typical UK B-road might pose without much jiggling or bristling. It works as well as ever on wide, smooth motorway lanes at high speed.