Immediately after both his team’s riders, Tom Sykes in second place and Michael van der Mark in third place, scored BMW’s first podiums on the M1000RR in the Donington Superpole WorldSBK race, Shaun Muir was asked in the pitlane about the significance of this result - particularly for a sometimes struggling effort in the early rounds.

“I think if we look at where we were last year, we dropped a lot of points. They weren't big points-scoring races, but we dropped a lot of points. This year we’ve got good reliability, which is important.

"We’ve now got a little bit more to fight with because we’ve got some straight-line speed. Mikey was always going to take time to get up to speed. We came away from Misano with a bloody nose, to be perfectly honest with you, which was a real shock to us because we thought that would have been a circuit we’d have done well at. But it’s fair to say a little bit of weather has helped us to that result there, but we’ve been in the right ballpark. We’ve been in and around Yamaha. We’ve been just off the top two or three in both sessions. So… really happy for the boys. Just the bit of a lift we’ve needed. We’ll go this second race and come away with hopefully a good points haul, but it doesn’t stop, does it?”

Asked which overall chassis specs the riders were using to record their podium finishes, Muir said, “Tom is using the standard one, and Michael is using kind of what we tested in Navarra which he feels comfortable with. There’s not a lot of difference now between them now anyway. One is a little bit stiffer in certain areas.”
What encouraged Muir most in some ways was the convergence of set-up for Sykes and van der Mark.

“There’s a consistency now between them and we haven’t seen a lot of that, as in a consistency in setup, in balance, front end base, rear end base, chassis settings,” said Muir. “They are now quite aligned. We’re just a little bit lost where Jonas and Eugene are, but for certain these guys are on the right path. This is a good direction.”

The rear end traction, into and out of corners, is an area all BMW riders have been asking about improvements in for some time. Muir gave his opinion on that situation.

“Well, we can’t do what the Yamaha is excellent at which is fire it on its nose and get it to drift into the corner and stay coming out,” said Muir. “That is our challenge, and that’s what we’re working on. We’ve got RPM to come. We’ve got some concessions to come. We’re in a not bad area. The lads are fighting. The only ones that are consistently out of our range are Jonathan and Toprak. I think that’s showing a step that we’ve made. We’ve just got to keep that consistency and I think if we can just tick that next box. We’ve got test dates in the pipeline and we’ve got a lot of material still in the pipeline. It’s not stopping. We want to get this right and we want to be challenging for wins by the end of the year.”

Muir is not quite sure of when BMW will test next, given that there is a limit on test days in 2021. “We haven’t pinned it down, but we have three days left to test,” he confirmed. “We’ll probably do one within the next three weeks and then we’ll probably wait until Catalunya.”