Excessive Force?

The BMW M5 Competition has just been launched in India and, along with the Mercedes‐AMG E 63 S, boasts more than 600bhp, 0‐100 times in the threes, and massive road presence. Which begs the question: can you have too much of a good thing?

- James Disdale

WHEN DOES A SUPER SALOON CEASE TO BE A super-saloon? When does it outgrow its genre and become something altogether more serious? Just as some supercars and hot hatches have created the subgenres of hypercar and hyper hatch respectively, so too certain super saloons have evolved to create the hyper saloon: witness BMW’s M5 Competition and Mercedes-AMG’s E 63 S.

Mustering more than 1200bhp between them, these ultimate expressions of what a four-door saloon is capable of will arrive at 100kmph in as near as dammit three seconds and, if the electronic safety net was packed away, romp to 300kmph. No matter the irrelevance of those numbers, it’s hard not to be impressed by the results. These are the go-faster four-doors that go faster than most.

These are also the pinnacle of BMW’s and AMG’s achievements for models that can also be bought with 2-liter turbodiesel engines. The M5 Competition is an upgrade of the regular M5, a car few have walked away from disappointed. Still, BMW M found more power from its twin-turbo V8 – a 24bhp increase – to raise the peak to 616bhp (torque still summits at 750Nm), and discovered it could carry out more work to its chassis. It rides 7mm lower, the springs are ten per cent stiffer, the adaptive dampers recalibrated and the anti-roll bar mounts firmer. They even threw in ball joints for the rear toe links, dialed in greater negative camber on the front wheels and increased engine mount stiffness by 50 per cent, all in the name of sharpening the M5’s edge.