Ahhh Terk, you and me both buddy.
I will take this thread in a slightly different direction since I don't know the answer to the question at hand- though, I'd sure love to know.
I have made my decision, with a heavy heart, but it is made. I am not going to take my E39 M5 off its lease as I had thought. I guess I have caught up with technology/ progress. I am going for an M6 instead. I simply like the idea of having a 4 seat coupe in the mix (the rear seats are for my kiddies). My conclusion, before seeing the 6 speed, is as you and others say: the cars are designed for SMG. I've driven it, although it was all too brief. When my dealer gets a demonstrator M5 I will borrow it for a little while. Whats funny is he thought Id want to flog it on the highway. Nothing could be further from what I want to verify for myself. We all know its fast. My question is does the system reaffirm my sense of fun that I got from my brief test drive. I think we have to accept the fact that its just different. In my mind this falls somewhere in a grey area between an automatic and a stick shift. I have found that some automatic based cars can be fun and I think my attitude on this has changed a little bit. Most of my driving wont be all the way to the red line nuts driving- so I will drive the demo on the same roads, to the same places, etc that I normally would.
Out of curiosity I made this little chart. I made it for another friend with an M5 and a Z8 with the Quaife 3.64 rear end. It is an excel sheet, but for some reason the upload applet will not let me send an .xls file. So I printed it to PDF and now all is OK
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I figured that in order to make up for the relatively high torque peak at 6100 RPMs, BMW would give us a kind of super aggressive 1st gear to be a kind of "tree-stump puller"- relative to what we have in the Z8 and M5. But thats not at all what they did.
First let me say I just did this quickly in some spare time where I looked at some charts that were done of the hp and torque curves of both the V8 and V10- so I had to pick data points and more or less guess what the values should be. However, I think it gives a good picture of whats going on.
What I see when I quickly look at this is the V10 (comparing to the M5) is about 10% down on power and torque in the lower RPMs but it is about 8% ahead in gearing in 1st gear. I would imagine a shift at around 4500 RPM in daily around town driving. There we're just down about 1% on torque and about 6% in power. But we will put in 2nd gear where we are about 20% ahead (vs the E39 m5). That should feel faster. Then I could see revving up into the 6000 range before a shift where we are about 20% ahead on torque and 6% on power- hit 3rd gear and you are 24% ahead of the old M5. And it keeps going on from there.
So it seems my gut sense was wrong. BMW didnt give us 1st as a torque gear- instead they must have recognized that we are already at a limit of how much power the tires can take so they are progressively giving more torque multiplication as you work through the gears to give more power to the rear tires as they can handle it. This even greater multiplier effect via gearing as you climb through the gears makes the car feel stronger and stronger. Now how cool is that?!
What will they do with the 6 speed? If they just use the same ratios from the E39 then this effect will not be as pronounced.
In my case, since I have a stick shift car that will remain in the garage, I am 99% of the way there to saying I will give SMGIII a go. I will probably opt for a 2 year lease because I would expect there to be the usual improvements/ freshening and if I find SMGIII is not the fit I expect it to be then I will move on to the 6 speed. I just find the technology too exciting and I think in this version they really refined many of the gripes we've had. My open question is: I know it drives great during aggressive driving- how do I feel about it during the more relaxed day to day stuff. An answer will be forthcoming.
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