Project Petrolhead

Every once in a while, three cars come along, doing the same sort of thing, at the same sort of time in three very different ways. This is one such story. One flexing a naturally aspirated engine and motorsport pedigree, one with four-wheel drive and the backing of the Volkswagen group, and one so damn powerful, that it required serious skill to keep it on the straight and narrow. I am of course talking about:

The E39 BMW M5, the C5 Audi RS6 and the Mercedes E55 AMG.

Yeah, sorry. We’ll talk about hybrid hypercars another day, but as you can see by the last few weeks’ worth of columns, I’m on a bit of a German performance kick at the moment, and these three Über-Saloons really do tick all the boxes, with subtle styling tweaks and serious engineering work underneath.

First out of the gate was the M5, BMW’s ever-present flagship. Probably the most subtle of the three with its “if you know, you know” body kit and quadruple exhausts, the real money was being spent on the oily bits. The naturally aspirated 4.9 litre V8 kicked out a healthy 400bhp, but the real fun came in the ability to rev it out to a staggering 7000rpm, a mere indicator of the M5’s athletic upbringing. The perfectly balanced chassis and supple damping setup paired with the factory-fit Limited Slip Differential meant that the M5 could transition from a gentle cruise to a full-blown smoky skid at the drop of a hat, and you would, of course, because the M5 managed to turn a relatively squidgy executive saloon into a Lotus Elise scaring B-road weapon.

Not to be outdone, Audi released their first attempt at a true super-saloon in 2002. The RS6, as it became known, differed from the BMW in a few notable ways, chiefly with its inclusion of four-wheel drive, as a nod back to Audi’s Quattro history. The second big difference? The engine. Not wanting to fight BMW’s best and brightest at their own game, Audi played to their strengths and gave the RS6 a 4.2 litre twin-turbo V8. A relative sledgehammer compared to the BMW’s scalpel, the Audi produced 444bhp, well-clear of the M5, with easy power gains possible for anyone who fancied voiding their warranty with some cheeky software manipulation. While the RS6 could repel it’s rival on the dragstrip, it struggled to hold ground out on the road, with relatively numb steering and a front-heavy balance that gave rise to Audi’s unshakable reputation for understeer. I would absolutely still have one though because:

A) You can have it as an estate, which is just cool

B) The Quattro four-wheel drive means it’ll still be blistering, whatever the weather

C) The intro scene in L4YER CAKE where a silver RS6 Avant drives up to a palatial country club, underpinned by The Cult’s She Sells Sanctuary might just be the single coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

There were supposed to be three cars, weren’t there? Oh yes there were, and in 2003, not content with watching their two biggest rivals own the sector, Mercedes-Benz staked their claim. How? Easy really. Just take a middle-manager spec E-Class and garnish it with the 470bhp 5.4 litre supercharged V8 from the SL55 Supercar (and the same basic block as the Mc-Merc SLR hypercar). The suspension? That’ll be the same squish-matic air suspension that you got on the standard car, perfect for cruising down the autobahn at a German government mandated 155mph… Or at least you would be, but those limiters had notoriously large “tolerances” that would often let cars blast past the 160mph mark before they considered cutting in. Aiming squarely at the RS6, Mercedes also unveiled an E55 wagon, so your dog could join in the tyre-smoking action as well, alongside the gorgeously swoopy first-generation CLS55 AMG. Don’t be fooled by the new name, the CLS was all E-class underneath, but that’s not exactly a bad thing.

So which one to have then? I suppose it’d have to be all three. The Audi for the day-to-day stuff, the M5 for a weekend blast, and a Merc (probably the CLS55 because… well just look at it) for the occasional cross-continent blast down to the south of France. And for those of you wondering why this normally Jag-centric column didn’t include the XJR, well as much as I love an X308 XJ, the sportiest offering simply didn’t cut the mustard against ze Germans with its relatively piddly 370bhp leaving it inhaling the tyre smoke of its rival deutsche marques.

 See what I did there?