Why the fastest version of a car isn’t always the best

Range-toppers aren’t always the best choice

The M5 has long been the pinnacle of the BMW 5 Series range, and it has always been very good, but it has lost all of its subtle Q-car status in recent generations, it has become far more difficult to deploy on public roads and the current one costs £111k.
All of which serves to enhance the appeal of what you might call the ‘lesser’ variants.
Case in point: I spotted what I thought was a very tidy E61-generation BMW 520d in a car park recently, with large, shiny alloys. But closer examination revealed that it was a rather more interesting beast: a 550i. I’ve always had a jones for them: they seem to have nearly everything the M5 has but none of the downsides.
In this generation, the M5 was a crazed, wild animal of a car, marrying a snarling but famously fragile 5.0-litre V10 with a clunky robotised manual paddle ’box. I was at a BMW press event back in 2005 where, as you would expect, the then new M5 was much in demand from the assembled h