The weather and a hangover have meant that today hasn’t yielded huge results, but there have been positive steps forward. This morning I collected some goodies from Vines BMW, and then headed down to Southampton to see a man called Rudi.

Rudi charges £80 to fix knackered dashboards where the pixels don’t work. I tried to take a photo of my dashboard before the operation, but typically this morning most of the pixels were working.

Note the car has done 113,615 miles, but most of the pixels displaying the first digit aren’t working. Also, the unit to the left that displays the five green, one yellow and one red service blobs didn’t work at all. It took Rudi about 5 minutes to remove the cluster.

He then took it into his house to work his magic. In the meantime I deployed some of the parts I obtained from BMW. I’d bought a new cover for the positive battery terminal under the bonnet – that was about a pound. No photo because of the torrential rain at the time.

Next I went to work on the broken rear cup holders. Unlike some, I don’t think cup holders are especially important in the rear – people there aren’t driving so they can hold their own poxy drink. As such I opted not to replace this broken mess, but to substitute in a storage tray that set me back about six quid.

Much neater – and no tools required! I’ve also bought, for £30, a set of new cup holders for the front, but as yet I’m not sure how to perform that operation so given a bit of research and a day without rain I’ll attempt that.

After about 40 minutes Rudi was back and demonstrated the cluster working perfectly in test mode.

The results of these small changes are very pleasing. It was horrible looking down at the dashboard to see a broken mess, a nasty feeling starting the car without knowing how many service blobs were left, and seeing a gaping coggy hole in the rear where the cup holders should have been.

Today was also my first proper run in the car. I just managed to eek 29mpg on the way back up the motorway, so on a run this car doesn’t use much more fuel that the E30 M3. I expect that at higher cruising speeds, due to the ratios and breeze block characteristics of the E30, that the M5 might actually be more efficient.

Charging around some back roads in the wet made me even more enthusiastic about what is without doubt the very best engine I’ve ever owned. It may actually be the best I’ve ever driven – the only other contender is the current M3 V8 (I’ve not driven the current M5). In the wet it’s possible to go really, really fast without ever exceeding 4,000rpm – the engine is so, so flexible, with oceans of torque available so low down.

All that torque means that effortless, wafting oversteer is also available on tap, and with a big heavy motor up front the car, although quite a large vessel, is good fun to slide around. On a more negative note the Vanos is quite a bit noisier when the oil is hot – I guess it gets thinner, and it also leads me to suspect that it’s not running 10W60 TWS like it should be. I’ll be adventuring down to Cornwall in a couple of weeks and so may pop in to Opie oils and stock up.