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The
trip started for me the 4th of April from Stockholm, driving alone
down to the south of Sweden, about 650 km with my M3 (Euro version
of course). The morning of the 5 th of April I met up with Mark and
Peter
in their Avusblue M5 1999 at the port of Helsingborg,
at 5 o'clock in the morning. They had the bad luck to pass a minor
snowstorm(!) during their trip south, which is with summer tires not
a nice experience. But with DSC engaged that was a minor drama. We
took the ferry to the Danish city of Helsingör.
The goal of the day was to arrive at the German tuner Nowack
in Mulheim-Ruhr
at lunchtime to meet up with fellow Swedish M5 owners and of course
test drive the Nowack M5 with 503 HP.
|
|
| Here
are we on the ferry to Denmark which took us about 20 minutes.
Here we used the switch to flip the M5 mirrors in. |
So
after arriving in Denmark we traveled on their 110 km/h restricted
roads towards Rödby, to take a ferry direct to the town of Puttgarten
in northern Germany. We got stuck in some morning rush traffic, but
in could average well above 100 km/h. On most clear spaces we went
around 180 km/h, because of the wet surfaces. On thing that was quite
funny, was that people looked on the M5 and M3 as they've seen a spaceship.
The reason -which came to my mind later on- was that the new M5
costs 1 550 000 Danish kroner, which is about 186 000 US dollar. So
a Danish BMW 528i costs only 10 000 USD less than lets say
a Swedish new M5. Hmmm, guess I stay in Sweden.
This
was quite annoying after a time, since the M5 drove first, some people
threw their car into the left lane just to look at the M5, not realizing
that a car was behind them going maybe 80 km/h faster than their car.
Anyway, the Danish highways were good and no incidents occurred.
After some hours we arrived to the ferry to Germany.
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| At
last arriving in Germany we have this sign, which means "UNRESTRICTED"!
On some signs there are even an additional sign underneath that
mentions the minimum speed allowed. |
So on our way through Germany we only stopped at a McDonald's, then went on towards Nowack. After the morning hours the traffic cleared and we could have some tries to test the 250 km/h speed limiter on both cars (which we already tested in Denmark...Schhh!). First time the M3 was a little bit faster, the needle speedometer pointing at 265 km/h and the on-board computer showed 257-258 km/h. But later on the M5 was faster at the 250 km/h walking slowly away. You could "fool" the 250 km/h speed limiter on the M5 by put a little amount of throttle instead of just floor it when you reach 250 km/h. By the way the limiter engages "soft" in 6th gear, but "harder" in 5th gear. A fun detail that maybe not the average M5 driver finds out all the time unless living in Germany...
We had some nice races also. First I saw Mark and Peter "locking onto" a Audi A6 2.4 Avant at about 200 km/h, that should of course be an easy match. But, hey, something strange happened. This Audi accelerated easily up to 250 km/h. This Audi is supposed to have 160 HP. Something is rotten i Denmark... Or Germany for that matter. On closer inspection we noticed that it was widened and had dual exhaust pipes on the left and right side. So, the car was an A6 4.2 Quattro with 300 HP. So the new "trend" in Germany is not to remove the badge on the trunk any longer. That was for the eighties. Now it is to put on a emblem of a car that have half of the engine effect. So we should have brought a 520i emblem with us...
The "high priority" cars to race with was the Porsche 993 Turbo. We chased some but no one was willing to race, so that wasn't so funny as it should be. But I guess that should be tough to beat anyway. |
