I always prefer to get the unpleasantries over with first, to leave more time to revel in the things that make you think and feel nice. To brief you, there are plenty of those to throw around when, as now, we are discussing a gleaming new BMW running on a twin-turbo 4.4-litre V8 with 547bhp, nearly 240kg ft of torque and which accelerates to 100kmh in 4.9 sec and bottoms out at a top speed of 270kmh.

However, to return to the darker stuff – for alas (and alack), the above rendition describes the quantifiable aspects of the new powerhouse that is the X6M, on general principles one of the least rational ideas that the generally level-headed folks at the Beamer Motorsport division have brought forth in their largely unchequered four decades of operation. It strikes me, in fact, to constitute a direct assault on one of their fundamental maxims: ‘we don’t do SUVs’. To compound the crime, they’ve done not one but two – the X5M pops up around the place as well. And out of this indiscretion flows the logical concomitants: automatic transmission, turbo, four-wheel drive, all streaming forth like lesser demons from the lower rings of the inferno.

And how’s this for timing? The tail end, or the brief calm before the next wave, of the most seismic financial disturbance since the 1930s, is pinned as the ideal spot to release on an unguarded world a two and a half ton behemoth primed to run in direct competition with the Cayenne Turbo S and the Mercedes ML63 AMG. Division chief Kay Segler denies the borderline truism that they are direct rivals, but he doesn’t fool me, and once you’ve compared price and performance across the three eh won’t convince many of you either.

The regular X6 handles brilliantly for such a bulky vehicle, a fact that did much to puncture the doubts of a sceptical media. Certainly, the X6M looks like it means business. Sitting on 20-inch rims and with a nose remodelled to incorporate gaping air ducts to cool the engine and larger brakes, it’s a suitably immense and intimidating sight in any rear-view mirror. And you’d have to be driving something genuinely nippy to make the image shrink. On the rare opportunities to open it up on the way to the circuit, the X6M’s twin-turbo V8 and tweaked six-speed ZF auto made mincemeat of the 2380kg kerb weight, the big car surging ahead with an effortless, torquey brutality. A glimpse of greatness?
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No. On the circuit, its weight (115kg more than the next most potent X6, the xDrive50i) is immediately apparent, not as a damper on the way it demolishes the straights or the speed it can carry through the turns, but the strain its speed and weight put on the sense of poise, balance and agility so impressive in lesser X6s. Braking hard from 140mph on a downhill straight that feeds into a tight left-right combination, the X6M feels as if it’s standing on its nose and unsettled at the rear, making it hard to judge the correct amount of trail braking into the first part of the turn – a necessary technique if you’re going to have any hope of quelling the understeer that dominates the chassis balance, even with the electronic traction regimes switched off. Good as the clever Dynamic Performance control system is at shifting torque between all four wheels to maximise grip and traction, it restricts the range of expression for the driver to a small band of throttle-induced neutrality to ever-increasing amounts of tyre-squealing understeer. In the dry at least, using the power to push the tail wide even by a few degrees simply isn’t possible.??Which rather removes the fun. As does an engine note that, at full tilt, somehow manages to make the big V8 sound like a curiously dull four-cylinder. Thankfully, on light throttle openings it’s whisperingly quiet. The excellent body control, supple ride and comfortable (if far from spacious) cabin add to the X6M’s undoubted ability to mix serious ground-covering pace with excellent refinement and habitability. But then much the same could be said for the $40K cheaper xDrive50i, which isn’t that much slower and sounds like a proper V8. If you want a quick X6, that remains our recommendation. The X6M may be fast, but it’s an even worse idea than we feared. So much for the sunshine I promised you after the rain at the start of this article.