What happens when you make a two-tonne Sports Utility Vehicle and give it a motor that produces 625 horsepower? We travel to the southwestern United States and find out
The United States of America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. Or so ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ goes, but one thing that country does have is wide, open roads and thousands upon thousands of acres of pristine wilderness. It is that sort of country where the car has become a potent symbol of individual freedom and mobility. It is also a symbol of speed and power, this is after all, the country of the Great Salt Lake, a flat pan of mesozoic layers upon which countless speed records have been set. It is, therefore, odd that the US has some of the strangest speed limits in the world, given its culture and roads. It is even stranger that the United States is the leading market for German carmaker BMW’s M series, buying fully 30 per cent of the 2,00,000 full-fat, full-power M cars produced in 2019, because American Freeways and even local roads have the most bizarre speed limits.
And when it comes to BMW’s M division, the cars that mad scientists drop their crazy glitter on, can go very, very fast indeed. Take the BMW X5M Competition and X6M Competition that I was flown halfway around the world to drive. Both these Sports Utility Vehicles that weigh the wrong side of two and half tonnes and can get from 0-100 kilometres per hour in 3.8 seconds. I have been on even faster cars than these, but in these cars I am sitting four feet up above the road surface, lording over mere mortals in sedans. In all the other fast cars that I have driven, my rear-end is separated from the road surface by about four inches. These are big, heavy vehicles and luxurious as well. But they have a 4.4 litre turbocharged V8 engine up front that produces 625 horsepower, and even if you get the slightly less insane X5M and X6M, you still get 600 horsepower and a 0-100 time 3.9 seconds.
Sure, you might say, put a big enough motor and anything can go fast, even a bungalow. Believe me when I tell you that I really tried to behave because after all, it was not the speed that got to me. It was the sensational handling of the cars. You would expect that given the huge 315-track Michelin Pilots these cars were wearing, they would take a corner at speed. And the roads through the mountains of Maricopa County, Arizona, were beautiful with the right amount of twists, dips and straights. But in your average SUV, usually when you take a turn at speed, you are holding onto the steering for dear life as inertia throws you out of your seat. And inertia and momentum are usually your enemies because as one knows from secondary school physics, it takes a lot of force to change the momentum. Ergo, a light, sporty car takes corners well because the lighter the car and the lower the centre of gravity, the less force it takes to change direction. Those of you who have driven early-build Gypsys would know how much they hated taking turns at speed. If you remember what angular momentum was, you’d understand why one saw so many Gypsys lying sideways.
This is where these cars excel — cornering. I swear on my grandmother’s memory that there was no perceptible body roll. None. I really did not even feel my sides pushed into the seats, you could put a spirit level on the dashboard and it wouldn’t really move. You take the car faster and faster through the corner and still it didn’t protest, there was nary a sound from the tires. Honestly, I really don’t know how this is physically possible on a car of this heft. This was like a Sumo wrestler matching the sprinter Michael Johnson on the inside lane of a 400 m track. The sheer speed of the car might stretch physics, the handling of these cars defied physics. This should not be possible. Yet, BMW’s mad scientists have taken the physics textbook and torn it apart yet again. Thankfully, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department had very kindly closed off a section of road for us road testers to do our thing. Trust me when I tell you that I tried damn hard, even at the risk of running into a giant Saguaro cactus to push these cars. These cars could easily beat a sports coupe on a track, not just on a straight but through the corners and I really hope that I get to do that sometime.
Personally, between the two I would choose the X5M over the X6M simply because of the fact that the X5 is a slightly roomier car than the X6, rest everything else is the same. They’re both fast and they both defy physics. Come to think of it, maybe one should ask the M division guys to develop a time machine, I mean since they lord over physics anyway, maybe they can break it altogether.