I’m clearly not making any new revelations by choosing this as my favorite M5, but did you know that the best BMW M5 ever made almost didn’t happen? And when it did, it almost had a turbocharged straight-six, not a V8.
Yeah -according to a very informative and expansive history piece on the S38 and M88 development history on the MyE28 forum, BMW execs thought that the 540i and the recently introduced E36 M3 would fulfill the needs of E34 M5 owners, but you and I are both reading this wondering what in the world they were smoking. Did they expect E34 customers to shell out for two cars? The fanatics were not happy, feeling that neither the M3 nor the 540i were exclusive enough.
Sadly, the E34 passed many things onto its progeny, but handbuilt construction was not one of them, and when BMW finally caved to demands to build the M5, it was on the same line as the regular 5 Series. But no matter – the E39 chassis was utterly sublime, and we kinda get why BMW executives thought it might have been good enough without an M badge. According to Top Gear, at some point, partly in response to the promise shown by the locally-tuned E34 Alpina B10 Bi-Turbo, Munich considered taking the straight-six turbo route of several of its racecars.
Instead, we ultimately got a glorious M62-based S62B50 V8 with 400 horsepower. It outsold the E34 in half the time.
