M For Maniac

The new BMW M5 is a product of its time - and the times, well, they couldn’t be better.

- Kushan Mitra

THE IC30 IS A LOVELY four-lane highway that cuts across the hills of the central Portuguese Atlantic coast, connecting the towns of Cascais and Sintra to the small villages up on the cliffs. It is not a full expressway, so it has a posted speed limit of just 100 kilometres per hour, but when I was driving there on a late-November morning, there was road work going on, blocking off a lane in my carriageway and, extremely frustratingly for me, putting me behind a white Renault delivery van.

So you could imagine my shock and horror when a smartly dressed Portuguese policeman asked me to pull over. I could not have been speeding, could I?

I glanced over nervously at my passenger, who happened to be Hormazd Sorabjee, the storied editor of Autocar India, who said a quick “Nah”, before rummaging in the glove compartment for all sorts of papers. Was there anything wrong, I asked the policeman? After he went through the papers, my license and a very useful letter written in Portuguese by the folks at BMW AG, explaining what we were doing, he calmly told me that there was nothing wrong - but how was the car?

I was still in a bit of shock, so I let Hormazd do the talking. It was utterly brilliant, he said. “And fast?” the policeman asked? Without skipping a beat, Hormazd said “Very, but we drove fast around the track at Estoril, not on your public roads.” The policeman kindly guided us back into traffic, and I started the short drive back to Estoril.