resistance to persistence

I was reading a review for the new BMW M5. It sounds amazing. 5 liter V10, 507HP, 8250 rpm redline. (0-100 kph) in 4.7 seconds, (0-200 kph) in 15 seconds!

One of the coolest things (but I don’t know when you’d use this) is the Launch mode:

Stand By for Take-Off . . .
Still, the marketers insist that’s what the customer wants, choice, and the engineers have delivered—and then they’ve added that ultimate option, launch control, which goes like this: Select full, 507-horsepower grunt via the one-touch “M Drive” button on the wheel. Now disable the Dynamic Stability Control, select the most aggressive of the “S” shift programs, hold the gearshift lever forward and floor the throttle.

The engine builds to optimum launch revs and stays there until you let go of the lever. Then the car catapults forwards with a chirp of tires and a mighty howl of power while you keep the pedal buried in the luxurious carpet. When the revs peak, it slams into the next gear and rides out the wheelspin, and then the same again, and again, and again—with barely describable violence—until it hits the M5’s voluntarily restricted 250 kph (155 mph) maximum

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2004 at 2:19 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.