PH’s least expensive M5 seems to have lived the most interesting life
The world is not short of thoroughly brave second-hand car purchases, and as Pill is still some way from having featured all of them you are entirely justified to be feeling peeved at what might initially seem a repeat. This is the second E39 M5 to have made it into the column, the first one being as recently as May. Yet there are several impeccable reasons why we couldn’t have chosen anything else this week.
In a world where too much is reduced to trite hashtags this is a car that really is Living The Dream, or possibly its Best Life. Not only has it managed to managed to amass 200,000 miles – which is still a genuine benchmark for more proletarian machinery – it also boasts a backstory that would justify a documentary.
It has become traditional to feature a précis of a Pill’s recent MOT history towards the end of the story. That won’t be possible here, as our car doesn’t currently have a ticket, and hasn’t since March 2017. It was put in for a test in May 2018 – two of them actually – but failed with rust in the floorpan and offside sill, plus worn anti-roll bar and suspension bushes. The owner is clearly an optimist, because this was just four days after it had failed a previous test with a shorter list of major defects. The fact the second test has “Mileage: unreadable” on it also suggests the known-to-fail digital display screen beneath the instruments might not be in the finest fettle, although the previous record does support that 200,000 tally.
So it’s fair to say the £6000 asking price – about as cheap as an E39 M5 gets these days – is just going to be where the spending starts on this one. That’s presuming that the new owner wants to put it back on the road, at this price it must be getting close to being worth more in its component parts than it is in one piece. Perhaps fortunately, the vendor has put an “enthusiast only” proviso in the advert, saying the car won’t be sold to “anyone who mentions lowering, tinting or drifting.” Eminently sensible, as long as the phone does ring.
Yet this M5 also stands as elegant testimony of its ability to take the sort of big mileages that E39s were rarely exposed to. It’s something I’ve never really understood, there are lots of fast Mercs out there with starship odometer mileages and even a few of the senior Audis get into the 2s. But it is rare to see any M car with something close to this on the clocks, and the ones that do make it into the stratosphere tend to look utterly wrecked. So our Pill is proof that, beyond the well-known failure points of the VANOS variable valve timing and grot, the E39 M5 is a tough old bus. Certainly when compared to some of the flakier M cars that have followed it.
While the advert isn’t short on detail about the car’s long history, one of the pictures encapsulates its interesting life pretty much entirely by itself. Yep, the one that shows it hauling a trailer carrying what appears to be a Benetton B201 Formula 1 car. I’m struggling really hard to think of a more stylish towcar-payload combo and, short of a C3 Corvette pulling a Saturn V rocket on a sled I really can’t come up with one. That’s because – the advert tells us – the seller’s day job is running and restoring historic Formula 1 cars. So, as the text puts it, “I am very familiar with running and looking after sensitive vehicles.” The selection of images also give photographic proof of the seller’s claims that the car has been a regular visitor to Monaco, which seems entirely in keeping with the rest of the story.
The car also seems to have had plenty of care, attention and cash lavished on it in the period before it went into hibernation, with the MOT history devoid of red prior to 2016. The advert promises it had a VANOS refurbishment and replacement bearing shells 12,000 miles ago, as well as a new clutch. There is almost certainly still going to be a fair amount of spending required to get it back on the road, and considerably more before it is going to be in contention at a Concours d’ Elegance. But there’s a fair amount of headroom for doing so – at £6k our Pill is barely more than half the price of the next cheapest E39 M5 in the classifieds, an 88,000-miler.
There’s also a strong appeal to a car that is being offered with its warty bits on such public display. It would be easy to spend considerably more on a well-polished car in a similar mechanical condition, or indeed one that has been quietly rusting for 20 years while the odometer has only been creeping up slowly. With a bit of nous and mechanical know-how it could be possible to get this M5 back on the road for considerably under what would be required to bag a less interesting car.
I’m a sucker for higher-mileage exotics – Simon George’s quarter-million Murcielago is still my favourite Lamborghini of all time. Anyone buying this M5 would need to have balls of steel and a wallet of depleted uranium, but what a great story to be part of. Let’s just hope the next owner uses the tow bar to tug something equally interesting around.
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