A Month In The Life Of: BMW M5 CS

The M5 CS was introduced in 2021, by which time the standard F90 M5 had been deleted from the model range, replaced by the mildly, but usefully upgraded M5 Competition. That cost a not inconsiderable £102,385 all by itself, to which adding those two little letters would cost you an additional £38,385. At just over £140,000, this M5 was now almost exactly double the price of the one you’d have bought just 10 years earlier. Then again, that F90 Comp would now have at least halved in value over the last five years, even if you kept the miles really low and the condition mint. The CS? They’ve gone up slightly and now trade at around £150,000, a number I’d expect only to rise once people work out just how stunningly rare such cars are. So over time it has proven almost an asset if you conveniently forget inflation, not a liability

You may wonder what you’d actually be buying over the Comp. And the answer is not much and a huge amount all at the same time and depending on how you look at it. Because you could say that another 10bhp, some suspension tweaks, new wheels, some carbon bits and a few badges don’t seem like particularly great value given you could buy a perfectly reasonable family holdall for a lot less than the difference BMW was asking. But talk about new intercoolers, revised turbochargers with greater boost, ceramic brakes, forged wheels, new springs, damper tuning and anti-roll bars, stronger engine mounts, a different exhaust, track day rubber, carbon-fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) for the roof, front splitter, rear spoiler and diffusers, sports seats and lashings of Alcantara and suddenly it doesn’t seem like so much after all.

Especially when you consider that those wheels and brakes, the carbon shell front seats and a few minor deletions – the front centre armrest, mobile charging pad and some sound deadening – led to a weight loss of 116kg over a standard F90 M5; it was even 70kg lighter than the apparently weight-reduced M5 Comp.

Sometimes, these Month In The Life Of stories feel like long overdue reunions with long lost friends – most notably with cars like the 997-generation Porsche 911 GT3 RS and Bentley Arnage – but this was not like that. It’s the third time I’ve driven an M5 CS – the launch, the 2024 story we did and now – and I still felt I was getting to know the car.

One of the key skills of such a machine is that you should reach a point in your relationship where you find yourself taking it entirely for granted. It’s outside, it’s not very clean, you have to go to a meeting 50 miles away, it takes you there and back and you’ve forgotten about it again as soon as the locks snap shut. This is something almost all M5s have done, even the less than brilliant ones like the F10. And it was always my biggest problem with the E60 and why, today and at least for me, it is the one of the less desirable M5s, even if you ignore the V10’s passion for unstitching itself. First they gave you a high output, low torque naturally aspirated engine, no better suited to the M5 than is the V12 in the Ferrari Purosangue, and then BMW made you manage it with an awkward robotised manual gearbox. It needed constant management. It never let you just switch off.

And I’d feared that, albeit for different reasons, the CS might be headed the same way. Those carbon seats feel less comfortable every time I get into one these days – yes I am getting old – and the additional firmness of the ride, wrought by a 7mm drop in ride height and the damper tune from an M8 Gran Coupe felt like it could become irksome quite quickly. Was a month of unrelenting arse-achery fast approaching?

It was not. Time without number I have sunk into lavishly upholstered chairs belonging to allegedly luxurious cars and within 20 minutes found myself shifting from cheek to cheek, longing for a clear stretch of motorway so I can get the cruise control on and start moving my right leg a bit. And how many cars appear beautifully damped when you’re alone going slowly on a smooth road but give up completely when any one of those easily delivered parameters become a bit more challenging? The M5’s seat just holds you in place, provides proper support for your lower back and recognises it doesn’t actually need to do anything else. And while the initial reaction of the dampers is undeniably firm, inputs are so beautifully rounded off the ride is never uncomfortable while body control is imperious at all times. Never believe anyone who tells you a firm ride is necessarily an uncomfortable ride or vice versa: both can and frequently are true, but there is no need for it to be that way.

Its year of manufacture is important too: 2021. If it had been registered after 6 July 2022, it would have been required by law to carry the full suite of ADAS systems, but as it is, the CS is one of the last genuinely plug and play BMWs, the plug referring to what you do with your seatbelt, and that is all you have to do.

I was also struck by how modern it still feels. I know 2021 is not that long ago, but the F90 itself is a 2017 car which is nine years and shortly to be six Prime Ministers ago. But it gives nothing, and I do mean nothing in terms of what I want from a car compared to models turning their wheels for the very first time today. Its screens are big enough, its equipment level lavish by any standards and lacking not one thing I would want such a car to have.

And you realise that so often cars get replaced not because they’ve become outdated or obsolete but because one of the market or the regulators or both demand it. The older a car the harder it is to sell because the market always wants something new, on the entirely false assumption that ‘new’ always means ‘better’. In the case of the current M5, I’d bet plenty it was a car BMW didn’t want to make but felt it had no choice and that the only option was to make it from the G90 flexible platform that provides for everything from a purely diesel powertrain to a full EV. Which is how you end up with an M5 weighing within a gnat’s crotchet of 2.5 tonnes.

At around 1800kg the M5 CS is a world away from that and, indeed, weighs no more than a new M3 which is fairly startling. But it shows.

For here is an entirely civilised four-door family saloon that’ll reach 62mph from rest in three seconds flat which is actually faster than I believe most people secretly want to go. But these stories are not about ultimate performance and it is the response and sound of that gorgeous V8 motor I’ll remember far longer than any near-meaningless stat about its ultimate capability. Though it’s worth pointing out it’s fully half a second quicker than its successor, despite the latter’s monstrous 717bhp output. There’s almost no lag either, little enough to make you wonder exactly what the G90’s hybrid drive is actually doing for you, other than decimating your tax bill.

But like all the best M5s, the E34 and E39 in particular, however wonderful the engine, its job is actually to help make the chassis shine, and in this regard it could hope for no better partner in crime. Because what you realise as the miles, days and weeks roll by, is that the CS is one of the rare and remarkable beasts which leaves the impression that it turned out better even than its creators dared hope it might be.

There’s a temptation now to lapse into lazy speak about it feeling like a two-door sports car, which it does not. All sorts of things, its weight, where that weight is and its wheelbase make the very suggestion a nonsense. But what it does feel like is perhaps the most finely honed full-sized family saloon I’ve driven. There is a deftness to the way it manages its mass, controls its body movements and lands always on the exact square of tarmac you aimed for which is unparalleled in my experience of similar machinery.

It is what I call a ‘qualification car’ where what it does is impressive only for the kind of car that it is, but that should in no way detract from its achievement. And it’s not just objectively impressive either: there is real communication between car and driver, a sense of being in it together, which is the very cornerstone of genuine driving pleasure.

But so too does it come tinged with a slight end of days sense to it. Love to though it might, it is very hard to see how BMW could ever do another M5 like it, what with the way the world has turned in those few short years since its star last shone. But at least it did actually happen and to those lucky few that have them, my only advice is to keep them. Because I don’t think we’ll see its like again.

Photography by Malcolm Griffiths