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Rating

Verdict The consummate wolf in sheep’s clothing

The latest BMW M5 has a 5 litre V10 engine that churns out 400bhp. It’ll do 0-60 in under 5sec and could, if it wasn’t electronically limited, hit 204mph.

Unfortunately, however, the recipe has been spoilt somewhat by someone who thinks pure engineering can be improved with a blizzard of technobabble. So before setting off for a 50-mile journey home on a lovely summer’s evening, I had to choose from 11 different settings on the seven-speed flappy paddle gearbox. Then I had to decide how ferocious I wanted the gearshifts to be: very fierce, quite fierce, moderately fierce, boring or very boring.

Why, I wailed to myself, can there not just be one big red button in the middle of the steering wheel that turns off all this crap?

But it seems that one of those buttons had told a computer deep in the bowels of the engine that I was in the mood for some fun. So now the V10 was no longer developing 400bhp. It was handing over a massive 507. As a result the M5 just flew.

And I discovered that deep beneath the layers of utter electronic nonsense, there’s one truly amazing car. Just when I was thinking that BMW had made yet another car for yet another software consultant, it did something I really wasn’t expecting. It became a full-on M5. And praise doesn’t come higher than that.

Current price £65,145

Price when tested (Jun 2005) £61,760

Engine 4999cc, 10 cylinders

Power 507bhp @ 7750rpm

Torque 383 lb ft @ 6100rpm

Transmission Seven-speed manual

Fuel/ 19.1mpg (combined) / 357g/km

0-62mph: 4.7sec

Top speed 155mph (limited)