In the latter stages of the 2021 championship, the BMW WorldSBK project, in its entirety, was looking up. Having signed the obvious race winning talent of Michael van der Mark to race alongside 2013 World Champion Tom Sykes, the official team scored five podiums all in, including a wet race win for VDM and the morale booster of a Superpole win for Sykes at Catalunya.

Fastest is fastest, after all.

These real world results were an indication that the whole M1000RR project was accelerating its potential for achievement steadily.

Losing Sykes, then signing genuine championship challenger after two years at Ducati, Scott Redding, was also maybe a potential step-up for stronger full-race performances, for many people, if not quite all.

When it was obvious that the Bonovo Action BMW team was going to be an completely de facto second works team (BMW referred to it as such in their official communiques) and with the proven winning talents of Eugene Laverty and Loris Baz on board, the 2022 BMW future was looking even brighter.
 
Even the immediate future, with Baz coming back from MotoAmerica in 2021 for two end-of-season rounds at Jerez and Portimao, including two podium finishes in Portugal. He was already top-three fresh, clearly.

Three back-to-back winter tests, at Misano, Jerez and finally a week or so ago at the official pre-season outings at Motorland Aragon, started in the middle of March. Quite cold still. And quite close to the start of the 2022 season, as some said at the time. This was significant to what happened at Motorland, as even the slightly raised temperatures seemed to throw things well off.

Van der Mark, probably the most immediate hope for more BMW podium success, was unfortunate to badly break his lower right leg and miss the testing action. But Redding, Laverty and Baz is still a strong line-up for any manufacturer to conjure with. Adding serial IDM Championship winner and EWC BMW rider Ilia Mikhalchik to the line-up to replace VDM was a good move, a very good move as the real racing started, even if he was a complete WorldSBK rookie.

Even taking into consideration that the recent Motorland Aragon round  was the first of the season, and there had been many planned and sudden changes to deal with, Motorland can only be seen as a disaster of a start for BMW.

Empirically and relatively, the stand-in rider having the best finish of only eighth in race one, and the best BMW rider of all - Baz - finishing seventh in race two for the second team was nowhere near what BMW or the outside world would consider an early season success.

BMW ‘rookie’ Redding’s Aragon cold, hard score card was filled in with a Superpole qualifying mark of 16th, a Race One 15th, a Superpole Race 12th and a Race Two DNF. Even having had to get used to an inline four-cylinder engine for the first time in his career the winter, for a rider who scored 37 WorldSBK podiums from 61 race starts (to the end of last year) Motorland was a woeful start in empirical terms. The 2019 BSB Champion has 12 recent wins on his WorldSBK record, so we all know his potential.

The weather was cold but consistently dry for all the Aragon tests but after two days of set-up and then three of racing the official Honda HRC team, featuring two complete WorldSBK rookies with MotoGP and Moto2 experience only, easily saw off the overall BMW effort in its combined potency.

Iker Lecuona (sixth, eighth and tenth) and Xavi Vierge (seventh, ninth and eighth - broken rib and all) had an all new paddock, category, team, race tyre and even recently-adopted Showa suspension and Nissin brakes to deal with at Motorland. And yet the overall Honda effort was clearly more prepared and capable in real race situations than the second year M1000RR and all its rider combinations.

Nobody in WorldSBK expected miracles from BMW, as all saw Redding’s move to BMW as an instant demotion in performance - based on pure results and championship results from recent seasons.
 
But Lecuona must have positively skipped home in a happy overall fifth place in the points table. He is tied on points with his new Honda team-mate Vierge, ranked sixth overall. Vierge may have just happily driven home, albeit carefully not to cause more pain in his injured rib. But surely entitled to grin all the way.

Baz left Motorland ninth, with 14 points, and a best BMW finish of seventh in race two. Laverty was 12th overall, best result 10th in race one.

Redding left with one single point for 15th in race one. He is 18th overall. He also left without speaking to the media in the post-race interviews, and all requests to speak to him after the usual post-race media scrum were politely but firmly rebutted. That, if nothing else underlined quite how off-beam the opening Beemer weekend was.

It seemed even worse than Redding’s already muted expectations had been after the pre-season tests.
Just before race weekend, right after the very glossy and really quite well done BMW season launch video ‘premiere’, upstairs in the plush BMW Hospitality unit, Redding was asked if things were not quite as ready as he wanted them to be on the eve of a new season.

He said, “I expected it to be a little bit easier, I will be honest, but everyone has got faster and improved as well. So, it is hard to make a double step, there are so many things to change and adapt to. But it is a long season, we will learn the most in the races, the races are what is important. Will it be a strong point or a weak point, we don’t know? And then from there on we need to build regardless of the situation.”

Those were his opinions a few hours before free practice one at round one.
 
Motorland was only the first round, so a strong bounce-back in performance and race results at Assen and beyond will make any current critiques and bewilderments moot. But it was as if the first round, starting in April not February as in most recent season, almost came as a surprise to them in some ways.

Redding’s official comments after the first weekend were all from BMW’s press service, but they read, “This weekend was not what I expected it to go like, even considering we had two days of testing on Monday and Tuesday. Then we come to the race weekend and we lost lap time. So for me it was hard to accept this. We worked very hard to try and solve our problem, but we really never got anything to help us through the weekend.

'It was hard. We need to understand why it was different, we need to understand why we are suffering more than with last year’s bike. There have been some changes on the engine and the bike so we need to understand why this happening because the potential is more. Then in the last race of the weekend, I just had no grip, the brakes where not working so well and the engine overheated.

'That is just how it goes. There is not much more to say. We need to work, understand and try to come back stronger because we don’t deserve to be in this position.”

There was more than a hint that the new, more powerful engine in this year's M1000RR works very with the chassis on a colder track but when it comes to something hotter, the setup and Bosch electronics can't cope with corner entry or exit...