Team put to test ahead of restart

North motor sport with ZOE BURN

WORLD Superbike team boss Shaun Muir says he is looking forward to the season resuming in Spain in a fortnight and believes his team is in a good place to challenge for strong results.

Muir, who owns the Guisborough-based BMW Motorrad Worldsbk Team, feels riders Eugene Laverty and Tom Sykes are in a much better position after a recent two-day test at Catalunya.

The 2020 World Superbike Championship season began at Phillip Island back in February, but like everything has been on hold since March due to the pandemic.

Now the WSB circus is gearing up for its return to action over the weekend of July 31-August 2 at Jerez, a week after Motogp has completed two back-to-back races at the Spanish track.

Ahead of the series’ return, the teams headed out to Catalunya near Barcelona for a two-day test.

And while the likes of Kawasaki’s Jonny Rea and Alex Lowes and Ducati’s Scott Redding were chasing lap times at the sharp end, Muir’s team was concentrating on fine-tuning its pair of BMW S1000RR machines.

Over the two-day test, the squad worked on finding the best possible basic set-up for Jerez along with allowing the riders familiarise themselves with Catalunya, where they’ll return for the sixth round of the season in September.

“We had some items to test and very important track familiarisation to get ready for the upcoming race later in the season,” he said.

“The updates that we had to test were mainly electronic strategy related and a lot of the other work that was focused on was race simulation runs and tyre wear in the latter stages of the race.

“I’m generally happy with both Tom and Eugene.”

Sykes, who won the championship back in 2013 and is keen to be back up at the sharp end fighting for wins, believes development is going in the right direction.

“We’ve been working on different geometry settings, front and rear suspensions parameters, chassis options and we have certainly improved the electronic strategy,” he said.

Laverty, meanwhile, enjoyed what he described as “the best run on the bike yet” and despite a crash, feels confident about the opening round.

“It’s been fantastic, particularly my race run in the final session. I had some good pace on the ‘X’ tyre and then jumped to the ‘Q’ tyre but had a little crash. The crash was a similar crash to the one in Phillip Island, which is something we need to look at.

“But, overall, I’m happy with the test and I’m looking forward to getting out in Jerez in a few weeks’ time.”