BMW M5 Competition 2018 UK first drive

The BMW M5 Competition is the new extra-powerful, sharpened and honed version of the M Division’s already pretty powerful and sharp BMW M5 super-saloon. We drove it in the summer on Portuguese roads; now's our chance to find out how well it takes to British ones.

This car is a result of BMW M’s decision to spin off at least one added-performance ‘special standalone model’ from every M car it makes from now on. That standalone model might be branded Competition, like this one, or it might be a CS, a GTS or possibly even something all-new. The suspense is unbearable, isn’t it? Whatever they’re called, there has been plenty already in what seems like a short space of time, and, quite clearly, there will be plenty more.

The clever bit is that, by committing to making them as a matter of course, BMW M evades much of the cynicism you might otherwise confer on it for milking yet more money out of the early adopters who always rush to buy one of the first examples of any M car on the market. If you want the ultimate M2, BMW M4, M5 or M8, you’ve now been put on notice that it almost certainly won’t be one of the very first ones in the showroom.

And if you choose to buy an early car anyway, run it for a year and then chop it in for the new and improved Competition version? Well, more fool you. Some would simply call that effective product lifecycle management.

There is, at least, a reasonable amount that separates the M5 Competition from the regular M5 in terms of mechanical make-up, and pleasingly, this isn’t just an engine ECU reflash, a dampers software update and a bootlid badge.

The Competition gets lowered and stiffened suspension springs all round, as well as shorter auxiliary (or helper) springs and retuned adaptive dampers. Other suspension hardware changes include ball-jointed rigid rear suspension mountings, new front anti-roll bar mountings and a revised geometry up front that increases negative wheel camber. You get a 20in forged alloy wheel as standard (up from 19in on the regular M5), but there’s no super-sticky ‘cup’ tyre here and no free upgrade to carbon-ceramic brakes.

Under the bonnet, the Competition overhaul endows the M5 with 616bhp, up from 591bhp, but no more torque (553lb ft) – at least not nominally. Compare the power and torque curves of the two cars and you’ll note they’re identical up to 5500rpm. Just at the point at which the regular M5’s power curve is reigned in and made to flatline between 5600 and 6700rpm, the Competition’s is allowed to keep rising to a true 6000rpm peak on the likes of which, had they found something similar at the top of Everest in 1953, even Hillary and Tenzing might have struggled to stand for that famous photograph.