BMW Alpina B10 V8S

There's an important question to ask yourself when checking over a BMW Alpina B10 V8S - what's it for? Sounds flippant. But isn't. Because for £5850 less than the £57,850 Alpina is charging for the privilege of parking a 375bhp B10 V8S in your private, CCTV-guarded space, you could have yourself a 400bhp M5.

You don't need me or anyone else to tell you why the M5's special, which returns us to the question of just where the B10 V8S fits into the grand scheme of things. According to Sytner's Nick Godfrey, wise to all things Alpina on account of selling them for a goodly number of years, this highly modified 5-series is aimed at those customers who actively don't want an M5. Such people exist? Sure, reckons Godfrey.

They want power and speed, but they don't want a race car. Ride quality and quiet cruising count to these people. So does an automatic gearbox.

Exclusivity is an issue, too, but then I don't cross the road every day afraid of being mown down by packs of unruly M5s.

Alright, enough cheek, although with Alpina now an official satellite of BMW, it's worth clarifying this potential crossover of purpose. And knowing the B10's niche helps establish if it's any good at what it's supposed to do, even if one might suppose that with a 4.8-litre V8 grunting out 376lb ft of torque, it's supposed to go quite quickly.

Speed, and lots of it, is certainly one of the Alpina's more impressive party pieces. Not having to live with the electronic limiter that restrains the M5 to 155mph, the B10 swooshes on up to 177mph. The claimed 0-62mph figure is 5.4sec; knock off a couple of tenths to give you a rough 0-60mph, and it's not so far adrift from the storming 4.9sec evo wrung from the last M5 we figured. The pleasure from the B10 results from being able to repeat the feat time after time, thanks to the efforts of its Switchtronic five-speed auto.

Consistent with Nick Godfrey's assertion that the Alpina is a sort of smoothed-off M5, the B10 goes about its business with a softer tone of voice than its fabled stablemate. Aurally there's no doubting the V8's potency, and when the ZF auto kicks down to release all 375 ponies you get visions of Days of Thunder, but there's never a hint of the cackling beast that bellows beneath the bonnet of the M-powered Five. Yet it's not like you'll be disappointed in the way the B10 sounds or goes, particularly beyond 4000rpm when the revs stack up ever more swiftly and the soundtrack picks up its