The 2005 BMW M5 is an engineering triumph of modernity that overturns conventional ideas about what combinations of qualities a car can have.

Night, early December. You must admit, it's not the best time for a stroll around Moscow. The cold wind, as if searching for lonely wanderers, roams through empty courtyards, whose arches look at the world with empty openings. But it's useless. On such a night, the streets are deserted. Probably, only I voluntarily leave home at four in the morning. However, there is a good reason for this, and it awaits my permission to inhale the frosty night air through ten throttle valves. Sleep is out of the question: the BMW M5 gives me no peace of mind. This car is so astonishing that you can only rid yourself of thoughts about it by getting behind the wheel, where everything falls into place. If you don't, then the reality of all impressions from yesterday's trip and the truthfulness of perceiving every road moment begin to seem doubtful over time.

The five-liter V10 engine, delivering more than one horsepower per liter of displacement (507 hp) and capable of instantly sending the tachometer needle past the 8000 rpm mark! A seven-speed robotic SMG gearbox with semi-automatic shifting, which performs this action in 65 milliseconds... Stop! There's a semantic inaccuracy in this statement: it doesn't 'perform' but is capable of performing, if you so wish. I wish, and I just need to decide what exactly I want from the car under the given circumstances. And they are as follows: under the wheels is not the legendary German autobahn A5, not the gray ribbon of the old Nürburgring, where the M5 often works as a 'taxi', and not even the winding roads of Italy, but frozen asphalt with a nasty film of winter de-icing agents. On the wheels are 19-inch rims with winter tires Pilot Alpine, and behind the wheel is not Sabine Schmitz at all. For such a case, as for any other, except attempts to storm off-road, there is a suitable combination of parameters in the M-mode settings menu.

We adjust the aggressiveness of the transmission: in the mode of fastest shifts, they are accompanied by strong jolts. It makes sense to endure them only when you want to squeeze every drop of the super sedan's dynamic potential (acceleration to 100 km/h in 4.7 seconds). Besides the shaking of the driver, which becomes annoying as soon as you switch from racing style to normal road driving, these jerks each time cause wheelspin of the drive wheels. Therefore, today it is reasonable to lower this parameter by two divisions out of five towards smoothness.

Set the suspension stiffness and the associated power steering adjustment to Sport mode. The dynamic stability system — to an intermediate position between the base algorithm and fully disabled electronics. I don't yet have the courage for the latter. This intermediate state is called M Dynamic mode: the system allows significant drifts but still intervenes. In extreme cases. And finally, the engine. Do you want only four hundred 'horses' or do we use all available ones? And if all five hundred and seven, then what character to give them: normal or hypersensitive? In winter, this is like choosing a way to heat up breakfast: use a personal nuclear power plant or would an atomic bomb be faster? Acceleration varies! The same time to sixty is perceived completely differently in different cars: in a fragile English roadster, when you're strapped into a bucket seat inside a racing cage, or among the identical neon instruments of tuned Japanese turbo cars.

The M5 is a massive sedan with excellent chassis. Acceleration on any gear is a slingshot string pulled to the limit. It is so direct and tangible that you can literally touch it, and so perfect that even the incredible sound of the multi-liter V10, which at insane 8000 rpm performs its song with a hoarseness of unusual timbre, pales in comparison. Today it's cold outside, and after each gear change, the car continues to accelerate for another hundred or two hundred meters, leaving a trail behind, and the rear wheels don't follow the track of the front ones. The M5 seems to absorb all the road's small imperfections, gulping down the road greedily. The motion is so powerful that looking in the mirrors is simply pointless: all the space in front of the car turns into motion, and there remains only emptiness that won't be filled soon. When braking with downshifts, the seatbelt literally holds you back. And yet, the pleasure from the sound of short throttle blips, which the car makes automatically, caring for the triple steel-carbon synchronizers of the gearbox, is stronger than the wave of these g-forces.

Not everyone can live in such a mode for long. And spending time daily in a car that perceives any touch of the accelerator pedal as a command to lunge, and every shift as a mission to save fractions of a second, would bore anyone. And here, in everyday use, the M5 has its own killer arguments. Yes, the base mode is slightly less comfortable than a regular 'five': the steering has a constant ratio, and the wheel itself is very light. The gearbox doesn't work as smoothly as a classic automatic, and the relaxed chassis doesn't reach the level of handling, say, of a three-liter sedan. However, this is, conditionally speaking, just a replacement in case of fatigue and a momentary desire to escape from a capricious beauty to a hospitable hostess. After all, the main operating mode is M. And it is precisely the possibility of fine-tuning that makes it so. All these subtleties of working with the M menu turned out to be really necessary: I adjusted the car many times to my changing mood. And not at all out of a desire to play with buttons.

The ability to drive a sports car that uses real racing technologies, and at the same time, without switching to another car, enjoy almost all the comforts and entertainment of premium sedans — this is a rare stroke of luck, and 120 thousand euros doesn't seem like an inflated price for such a car. The M5 is capable of incredibly much. Neither snow, nor frost, nor an inexperienced female driver can stop it. The only Russian limitation for the M5 is at the other pole! And it lies in the fact that it simply won't be able to demonstrate its best qualities anywhere on the expanses of central Russia, unfortunately.

+ Fine-tuning, technical perfection, dynamics and handling.
– Lack of worthy roads and tracks in Russia.

Technical specifications of BMW M5

Curb weight, kg – 1830
Dimensions, mm:
- length – 4855
- width – 1846
- height – 1469
Wheelbase, mm – 2889
Maximum speed, km/h – 250
Acceleration time to 100 km/h, s – 4.7
Fuel consumption, l/100 km:
- urban cycle – 22.7
- suburban – 10.2
- combined – 14.8
Engine:
- type – V10, 40-valve
- displacement, cm3 – 4999
- power, hp at rpm – 507/7750
- torque, Nm at rpm – 520/6100
Transmission – 7-speed, SMG Drivelogic
Tire sizes:
- front – 255/40R19
- rear – 285/35R19
Price, euros – 123,800