Here is a quick reminder of M5 Stuff That Is True™
1. Silver cars are rubbish. All shades, atrocious.
2. 3.8 cars never make their advertised 347bhp, and even when they do, it's for about half an hour before their conrods stop going up and down and switch to left and right, traditionally straight through the side of the engine block.
3. Scandinavian people earn far too much money and repair their cars when it would be so much easier to torch it, claim the insurance and buy another.
4. Red cars are of course, awesome.
5. 540i drivers are legally required to demonstrate their inadequacies by tearing away in town with no warning whatsoever and then crowing about it on bimmer forums (whatever that is) whilst steadfastly refusing to race at anything over 90mph on a wide open road.
6. Often, red cars appear to have faded paint, this is of course caused by them being twice as fast as other lesser colours and the inability of normal cameras to compensate for velocity adjusted red-shift.
7. Chain tensioners should be replaced with the shiny new M3 part every Tuesday, even though no-one actually has first hand evidence of one snapping.
8. EDC-III is so good that BMW don't use it anymore.
9. In secret, BMW do actually call the M-Sport mirrors fitted to the 95 cars "M3 Mirrors".
10. Americans don't actually pay what they say they do for E34 M5's, it's a gentleman’s agreement that they triple the figure when written down or spoken in order to annoy Europeans.
11. Without exception, no M5 spare part may be imported to Australia unless the courier cost is more than the part, unless the courier has dropped or otherwise damaged the parcel in transit.
12. All LondonMike’s E39 V8 conversion photographs are Photoshopped. No such car exists.
14. Did I mention how much Red cars rock?
15. The E34 will out-handle an E39 M5. No, it's two decades old, it won't. George Foreman might once have punched Floyd Mayweather's lights out, but now he sells kitchen utensils on Channel I-can't-count-this-far.
16. The E28 M5 is faster and more fun than an E34 M5. Yes, in the way that rollercoasters hastily re-assembled by toothless illiterate seventeen-year-old gypsies in travelling fairgrounds are more fun than anything Intamin AG ever built.
17. K&N filters are the business on S38 engines. They get all that nasty hot air out of the engine bay by allowing it to escape through the engine and out the exhaust. Also, the oil they use will coat and protect your MAF wire from err… stuff.
18. BMW Dealers don’t do valve clearances on Inspection II, so you shouldn’t.
19. The E34 manifold air-pump is actually the result of a drunk German bet in 1987, where the head of BMW Motorsport GmbH wagered at an Xmas party that he could get the S38 engine through emissions testing simply by soldering on a hole in the exhaust to dilute the monoxide ***** the car was killing kittens with.
20. The OEM spoiler is a work of art, a true shining example of form and function, a legend of touch and feel within the automotive industry, without which the E34 M5 is hideously emasculated.
21. And bloody awkward to reverse.
22. Engine mounts, shocks, wheels, discs, gearbox internals, alternators, air-con components, gaskets and pistons are all reasonably priced parts and have a wide range of aftermarket manufacturers competing with BMW in order to keep both prices down and availability up, so this should be no bar or reason for new owners to be dissuaded from purchasing this model.
23. A E34 M5 priced at £2K on Autotrader is
exactly the same as the same thing as the one priced at £10k by the BMW-Car Club owner on Pistonheads. The price purely reflects it might need cleaning a bit or something, or perhaps of course, it is not red.
24. The chain tensioner mechanism can get stuck if the engine is under load in the wrong direction of rotation when being worked on in garage, resulting in loss of compression and necessitating a complete engine rebuild. If your garage reports this unfortunate incident has occurred, then in the months whilst you are saving up the £8k for this, why not check out YouTube footage of your car going sideways round Tesco’s car park at 3:00am the night before by your friendly mechanic?
25. The OBC does not obey Asimov’s First Law of Robotics, and will in fact cause harm to a human by displaying 17mpg at all times.
26. Pouring brake fluid into the little hole where steering pump fluid for the steering pump and self-levelling suspension is supposed to go is perfectly acceptable.*
27. A little known fact is that Elton John used to work for Hella in the late 1980’s and helped design the OEM headlights used on the E34 M5. That is why they illuminate the road ahead like a Candle In The Wind.
28. If your car is an early superior four-seat model, whilst sitting naked on the drawer top, the maximum height of woman you can make love to is 5’1”.
29. Farrell can only change the coolant on 3.8 cars. 3.6’s make his head hurt.
30. The E34 responds well to 19”, 20” and bigger rims with haaa-uge tyres with much aplomb and nary a foot wrong on the track. Why not spend more on bling rims and less on tyres, I mean, they’ll only wear out, so like socks at Xmas, only buy cheap ones.
Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.
Cheers!
*Umm… Did this four years ago and it still works.
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