BMW’s Michael van der Mark has had a rollercoaster of a fortnight with the arrival of his son, Mason, sandwiched between two WorldSBK events - both at new circuits. 

Van der Mark missed the Barcelona test to welcome his, and partner Nadieh’s, newborn son into the world before heading to Navarra for the championship’s second, of three, visits to Spain this season. 

“It has been an exciting time since I returned from Most. On Thursday evening after the race weekend, Mason was born and it is great be able to spend some days with the family before heading to the next round,” a delighted van der Mark said. 

“Now we will race at Navarra, and it is always good to have a new track on the calendar. We have been testing there and it is quite different compared to other tracks. It is really narrow and overtaking can be hard. It’s good that we have done a test there, even if our bike has changed quite a lot since then, so I am curious to find out how it will work. 

“The first goal for the weekend is to qualify a little bit better. In Most I was a bit unlucky in qualifying with some traffic, I must say, but we’ve seen that for example on Saturday and Sunday we made a huge improvement on lap times and also pace-wise so it seems that we really found a good way with the set-up of the bike. 

“Hopefully we will find that right set-up at Navarra pretty soon so we are right at the point from the start.”