If somebody asks you from now on why people even bother with tuning their already potent vehicles, all you need to do is show them this video of a standard BMW M5 Competition, a BMW M550i (or BMW M5 Lite, as they're called), and a monster tune of a BMW M5 Competition putting out 1,000 horsepower.
Does it really make that much power? It's doubtful the dyno test produced such a round number, but it's definitely in that ballpark. And bear in mind that means it might be lower, but it could just as well sit slightly over the 1,000 hp, even though we'd be surprised if that were the case. Surely, they would have introduced the car as having "over 1,000 hp" if it did.
Anyway, around 1,000 hp is enough to put it miles ahead of its two siblings that showed up for the race, despite all sharing the same engine. BMW decided to give the least powerful of the bunch, the M550i, 530 hp out of the 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8, but strangely enough the same maximum torque output as the M5 Competition - 553 lb-ft or 750 Nm.
Moving up to the M5 Competition, its horsepower output is bumped up to 625, almost a full 100 hp more than the M550i, and as you're about to see, the gap is quite obvious. But maybe not quite as obvious as the one between the stock M5 Competition and the tuned one. The pre-facelift F90 M5 Competition also has 811 lb-ft (1,100 Nm) of torque to go with that crazy amount of power, which is enough to prevent it from using the launch control feature since it wasn't designed to cope with the extra grunt.
Depending on how you look at it, the comparison between the three BMWs is made either more difficult or more interesting by the fact the surface of the track is soaked in water, with the occasional puddle providing the unwanted opportunity to lose track.
If you're looking for a closer race, you should welcome the adverse conditions. If you want to find out the actual performance gap between these three, then you should wait for the rematch on a dry surface that will probably never happen.
Either way, witnessing that 1,000 M5 is nothing short of breathtaking. Even when it has a bad start, you just know it's going to come flying by at some point before you reach the finish line. As for the rolling start in manual mode, we'll just let you discover how that goes on your own.
"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie) Full profile
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