After just three podiums and an injured rider, BMW boss Shaun Muir reflects on a challenging WorldSBK season.

2022 saw Scott Redding swap his Ducati Panigale for the BMW M1000RR and its safe to say it didn’t go as planned in the early stages. A single point from three races at Motorland Aragon heralded issues for the new partnership with the summer proving more fruitful, thanks to the arrival of his first podium in front of a delighted crowd on home soil.

While Redding was coming to terms with his new bike, his teammate, Michael van der Mark, was out through injury - suffering both during preseason and again at Estoril. Despite a brief appearance at his local TT Circuit Assen in April, the team was largely denied its reference point until the Dutchman returned at Magny-Cours, in September.

“When we look at where we started with Scott, we had a really, really tough time in pre-season testing,” Muir reflected on the turbulent year. “Scott found it really difficult. Went to Aragon and he was really lost. Didn’t have Michael. [Ilya] Mykhalchyk stood in for Mickey so we completely lost our reference point and, obviously, Loris [Baz] was new to the Bonovo team, so we didn’t have a reference on that side; only Eugene [Laverty]. From the whole group, both Bonovo and the factory team, we were all struggling really to find our level.

“As soon as Michael got back, effectively Estoril, he was injured again. It took Scott maybe four rounds to get any real feeling. He had an okay Assen and then moving forward from Assen it started to come to him a little bit. He definitely needs more time on the bike and more testing, but we became a little bit caught up in trying to get Scott comfortable instead of developing the bike, and I think that was one of the areas where we would’ve done things slightly differently.”

While 2022 was tough, 2023 is already looking up.  

“When the updated bike comes out, it’s got some ergonomic changes. The chassis should be better for us, the engine characteristics should be better for us, the gearbox will be better for us.

"We’ll have an evolution of the Kalex swingarm - which is well publicised that we got in the middle of the year. I think that made small differences but not the main differences.

“I think the main difference for us was that Scott settled down. Loris started to find some pace as well, but it was clear to us that we just needed more time and more laps under our belts. Coming out of that three podiums on the spin, and the steps we’d made in terms of the balancing of the chassis, I’d like to say, with the proper base setting that Scott could refer back to and the Kalex swingarm, the new link we had, it really gave us a complete new base setting that we could move forward with. That’s effectively what we did in the middle of the season, but we didn’t manage to kick on from there and quite a few others have done that, so that’s where we lost momentum.

“One of the big things we’ve worked on between last year and this year was getting race consistency out of the tyre and that’s definitely something we have improved upon,’ he continued, confidently. “We just really haven’t had those results to show for it, but we certainly haven’t been sliding down the grid at two-thirds race distance which we would do frequently in the past.

“There isn’t a one tick item that’s going to give us that success we’re looking for. It’s the consistency of all those parts: the electronics, the engine, the chassis. That’s where I feel, going into winter, we’ll be able to consolidate a little bit more. It needs a fit Michael, it needs Scott to really be on his game, to take us forward.”