I am flying down a back road. The tachometer rises to soaring heights, six, seven, eight thousand rpms, ten cylinders furiously howling a siren song, before a slam-bang a click of the right shift paddle commands a robotized manual gearbox to pound into the next gear and beginning the whole thing again, sailing away into surreal speeds on a tidal wave of sinuous screams. This is not an Italian exotic, this is a used BMW sedan – specifically, a 2006 BMW E60 M5. A product of its time, a misunderstood monster with manners, the closest thing to a real supercar the brand has ever built, in all ways good and bad.
The M in BMW M performance cars stands for motorsport, and they have always meant it, but what it meant has varied a lot over the years. The first M5 sports sedan was fitted with a literal Group A Touring Car race engine, and the current M5 similarly uses engine building know-how that’s proven in LMDh-class endurance racing around the world. The E60 BMW M5, built from 2006 to 2010 was a product of its era, and in that era, BMW was doing exceptionally well in Formula 1. That’s the energy they channeled into this curious car.
Making a car that’s F1-inspired always makes waves, but if you’re actually trying to do it the legit way, the finished product is usually polarizing, because F1 cars are fussy animals. The McLaren F1 (also powered by a BMW engine that won many races) is a legend now, but in its day it was seen as an overpriced experiment with dicey high-speed handling. Ferrari’s F50 got even closer to an authentic Formula 1 recipe, using an engine that lifted directly out of an F1 car, and even going as far as constructing the car using the engine as part of the frame, with the rear suspension bolted directly to the engine and transmission, with no vibration dampening rubber bushings, just like a real F1 car. Reviewers hated it. Too edgy, too rough, too brutal.
F1 cars in the era of this M5 were histrionic in a way that hasn’t been seen before or since. There are still lap records that stand to this day, from these V10 monsters that split the atmosphere screaming to almost twenty thousand rpms, pushing nearly a thousand horsepower. When BMW started working on this M5, technical regulations stipulated that an engine only had to last for one race weekend; now they get three engines for a whole 24-race season. These monsters were constructed to such exacting tolerances that they had to be kept on life support at rest, hooked up to a pump circulating warm coolant through them, or else they’d seize up before being sent out to die in battle.
To say it was ambitious of BMW to develop a road-going engine from this formula would be an understatement.
Up to this point, BMW M’s engines were all based on existing engine designs, heavily modified to sing. The famous, or infamous “S85” engine that powers this car was their first completely ground-up design in a road car, and it borrowed a lot from their F1 program at the time. The block is cast from eutectic aluminum-silicon alloy, with a bedplate design to reduce weight and greatly enhance strength. Not only is this the same as what BMW was doing in Williams’s race winning F1 cars, they were even cast in the same factory in Landshut.
This wasn’t just a flex, it was necessary to sustain the extreme forces inherent to the high-revving, high compression, odd-firing 5-liter V10 configuration that they landed on. In an era where Mercedes and AMG were making waves about a stroked and supercharged single-cam truck engine with 469 horsepower, BMW M struck back with 507 horsepower from less displacement, and without forced induction, either. That was a flex.
As a further flex on the Stuttgart crowd and a deeper dive into racing tech, this V10 was paired with a bespoke 7-speed automated sequential manual gearbox, just like the F1 racers and Italian supercars of the time. A conventional 6-speed manual gearbox was eventually offered, but only for the US market, and reviews at the time were nonplussed, as it was the same ‘box from the previous generation V8-powered M5, with gear ratios better suited to that engine’s fat torque spread, rather than this V10’s somewhat peaky, rev-centric nature.
Now having driven it, I can see what those reviewers were talking about. It makes 383 foot-pounds of torque, but it arrives at 6,100 rpms, higher than a lot of engines can rev at all. Those seven close-ratio cogs are really necessary to keep the engine on a fast rolling boil in the sweet spot of its VANOS variable valve timing, just like needing to redline an old Honda Type R on every shift to keep it from falling out of VTEC fury.
This is unusual for a BMW; they’ve always been known for making engines that like to rev, but don’t necessarily need to, whether it’s powering two wheels or four. Variable valve timing and tricky ionic knock detection help bolster the mild mid-range, but this engine definitely feels like an outlier compared to quite literally everything else they’ve ever made.
It also sounds unlike anything else they’ve ever made; compared to the barrel-chested straight sixes of the early M5s and the thumping V8s of the cars that came after, this V10 is downright alien. It sounds exotic at every speed, with the signature thrum of an Audi or Volvo five cylinder filling your ears around town, giving way to a properly exotic, Lamborghini-esque howl as you climb into the extreme reaches of the tach.
On the other hand, the very-of-its-time gearbox is considerably less alien than you’d think. It’s definitely more than a little strange for the manual purist, but worth noting that it’s far, far more effective than most of the same tech from Modena or Gaydon at the time. Where in the past I’ve wondered how anyone could possibly tolerate a transmission like this, this BMW SMG feels… still very much of its time, but not intolerable by any stretch.
It’s hugely aided by a rocker switch that changes shift behaviour in automatic and manual mode from one of five modes, starting from granny-shiftin’ and getting progressively more raucous until it’s damn near abusive at full tilt – normally I do not care for drive modes and junk at all, but it’s actually a nice way to easily dial the shift behaviour to suit your setting, rather than just having to drive around it all the time.
Speaking of modes, this was the first M car to utilize the M button, which instantly activates the M5’s many configurable powertrain and adaptive suspension (also a first) settings into a pre-determined user setting, which transforms the M5 from soft sedan to flat out supercar. I think this was the first M car to really establish the absolutely psychotic Jekyll and Hyde split personality disorder that characterizes M cars today.
At its most docile, it’s quiet, smooth, compliant, luxurious, and, once you’ve adapted to the gearbox, quite easy to drive. With phasers set to kill, it is ravenous, a furious machine eagerly devouring apexes, sliding out of corners and slamming shifts like it’s the last thing it’ll ever do. It is so alive, so finely balanced, and beautifully talkative that it’s one of the most satisfying experiences to ever roll out of Bavaria if you have the space and testicular fortitude to fully commit to letting the M5’s Formula 1 spirit out of its cage.
This bipolar personality is as much a liability as it is an asset. Like most modern M cars, it’s not really fun with light hooning – you know, the kind of playful stuff you might try on the street. Like a child with severe ADHD, it only knows how to function under extreme pressure, and doesn’t really understand anything other than a full commitment to the task. It’s like asking a cheetah to jog, it just doesn’t get it.
The E60 BMW M5 in a lot of ways feels like a tortured genius, born from a highly specific, aspirational vision, and when allowed to cook, it produces highs that haven’t been hit since. A commendable job has been done trying to train this beast to masquerade as a normal car, and that’s almost the strangest part of the whole experience. It is, at its core, still a large, comfortable, BMW luxury sedan. The fact that it can do that and also be a Lamborghini Gallardo at the same time creates a cognitive dissonance that takes a lot of time to reconcile.
It also developed a bit of an infamy for being fragile. In some ways, it was a little too close to the F1 engines of its era, needing warmth to survive, like reptiles. While the S85 wasn’t quite that extreme, it really needs to be babied to survive warm-up, and if not, they developed a proclivity for eating connecting rod bearings quite early. They too were machined too tightly for their own good; I’m not sure there’s a more stereotypically nerdy German problem than production methods being too precise.
In the years since, the engine has proven itself to be quite stout, with some quirks given proper care. Just like it took me some time to warm up to this car, it’s taken the world some time to understand and appreciate it. It’s very much a product of its era, a display of new and promising technology, some of which would continue to be developed like iDrive and adaptive suspension, and some of which would be abandoned, like the scintillating V10 and the sequential transmission. In some ways it feels like a really nice Betamax player, an alternative vision that ended up being abandoned, but it wasn’t without merit.
No one builds this kind of car anymore. The closest thing to it was Lamborghini’s Huracan, and that too has gone the way of the Betamax player, its unique engine having been cut down and replaced with a (very promising) cookie-cutter 4L turbo V8, just like BMW and everyone else. Failed experiment, tortured genius, misunderstood monster, whatever you want to call it, there’s nothing else like this. BMW M hasn’t been allowed free-reign over a road car like this since; this was their only shot at something special, even for them.
The E60 BMW M5 is fussy, occasionally awkward, and always interesting, anxiously waiting to put on a show, like the best supercars and racecars. I could give my Mom any M5 before or after this and she’d be fine, but she’d be upset with this car. It’s a curious blend of identities, having to juggle being a high-strung Italian-style exotic while also being an approachable luxury sedan. In some ways I could see it being called a worst of both worlds, but if you spend some time with it and learn to adapt to what it needs, you’ll see it’s something really special. Perhaps too special, but that’s the point. It is concocted from the number one formula.
