BMW M5 - long-term review

Modern tyres are amazing. Ever since it came off its winter rubber back in early April, the M5 has been sporting the same set of Pirelli P Zero Rs. They’ve now covered over 9,000 miles and still have pretty much half their tread depth left. 

The reason this is so impressive is because of what we’re asking these tyres to cope with. Let’s leave aside how I’ve used them for now and just look at two diametrically opposed things: weight and sportiness. This is a 717bhp super-estate that rips around corners pulling over 1.2g and has awesome acceleration and braking power. All while weighing over two and a half tonnes. 

This is a crazy combination - weight and power have both ballooned in the last ten years, so you’d imagine it would be the tyre firms scrabbling to keep up, and yet… that doesn’t appear to be the case. Each of the M5s tyres, while doing all the turning, gripping and rolling, is also dealing with 625kg of weight. You’d be forgiven for thinking they’d have to have the consistency of warm tar to grip properly. And at the same time be made of granite to resist the wear caused by being ground so hard into the surface. 

The cycling industry has a neat phrase that encapsulates this dichotomy: light, strong, cheap: pick two. Here we can tweak that: grippy, durable, cheap: pick two. A rear 295/35 ZR21 P Zero R is around £350. Cheaper tyres are available. I wouldn’t recommend them. I don’t know who’s to thank here - BMW for whatever geometry masterclass it is that uses the tyre so evenly, or Pirelli’s science witchcraft with rubber and silicon. A combination of the two, I’m sure.

All this is doubly impressive considering the demands that have been made of the BMW. In the last few weeks it’s been called on three times to spend its day getting covered in cameras to chase other, considerably faster cars around racetracks. It’s a job to which the M5 Touring is brilliantly well suited. 

Besides the driver, you have two camera operators in the car (one for the front camera, the other for the rear), plus someone calling the shots. So you’re four up, screens and cables are running everywhere, the M5 is approaching three tonnes and you’re chasing an Aston Martin Valkyrie around Thruxton or have a Koenigsegg CC850 bearing down on you into Follow Through. And yet the only thing having a hissy fit (perhaps understandably) is the blade-less drone clamped to the nose like a fly with its wings pulled off. 

You need a car that is fast, secure and smooth, that sits well at speed and provides a stable platform for the people trying to aim cameras around. The M5 gets the call time and again. And here’s the rub - the weight probably helps it, steamrollering surfaces into submission. At one point I got it to a 1.39g peak at Dunsfold. It did a whole tank of fuel, probably 80 miles of nothing but hammering around for the Bosses feature, then did the same again on the Valkyrie vs AMG One shoot and for the Aston Valhalla at Silverstone.

Same set of tyres, no pressure changes, just making sure they’re up to temperature before I go too hard on them. Yeah, sure, 90 per cent of the Touring’s mileage is cruising, but the other 10 per cent is anything but. I honestly expected the Pirellis would be toasted after one day of track duty, but they came back again and again. And will now outlast our time with the car. Next month we’re saying goodbye to the M5.