Yahoo Autos 2019 BMW M5 Competition: Here It Is
The new BMW M5 went on sale just a few months ago, and recently, we got our hands on one for testing. Performance figures only tell part of a car's story, but they're relevant today-the 2018 M5 hit 60 mph in 2.8 seconds and ran the quarter-mile in 10.8 seconds. And somehow, this isn't enough.
Just after the regular M5 debuted, BMW has rolled out a new, quicker version, the 2019 M5 Competition. This isn't a surprise-BMW M head Frank Van Meel told us last November this car would arrive soon-but it's still worth pausing at the absurdity. We're only just wrapping our heads around the speed generated by the base 600-hp M5, and now there's one with 617 hp. What a world.
The M5 Competition isn't a significant rework of the base car, rather, it's tweaked to offer more performance. Its ride height is set 7mm lower, spring rates are upped by 10 percent at the front and rear axle, while the rear gets a stiffer sway bar and solid mountings for its toe links. The M5 Competition gets stiffer engine mounts and reworked dampers too.
Software tuning is responsible for the 17-hp gain from the M5 Competition's 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8, and while peak torque remains unchanged at 553 lb-ft of torque, it's available ever so slightly higher in the rev band. Twenty-inch forged alloy wheels and a sports exhaust round out the hardware changes for the M5 Competition, while everything else is down to software calibration.
All of this, BMW, says results in a 3.1-second 0-60 mph run and a 10.8-second 0-124 mph run. Considering we timed the standard M5 as being a lot quicker than this, we bet these figures are conservative. Which is crazy.
You know we live in weird times, when it's just months after the release of a really, really quick car that we get an even quicker version. Not that this is a bad thing.
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