Race feature
Shaun Muir bares all about his Milwaukee Aprilia squad!
But upon leaving the domestic scene at the end of 2015, following Josh Brookes’ season of dominance in BSB on the Milwaukee Yamaha R1, it’s not been plain sailing for Muir nor his Guisborough-based Shaun Muir Racing (SMR) team.
In fact, it’s been anything but as a year and a half into their three-year World Superbike tenure, they’ve yet to have a sniff of a podium, let alone a race victory. But as normal, there’s more to it than meets the eye and it’s a thorny subject which Shaun is all too happy to give his version of with his typical no-punchespulled demeanour.
But just for a minute, let’s go back to the start of this road and their successes in British Superbikes at the turn of the decade as that played a key role in today’s situation.
Muir begins: “We’d grown into the championship on the shirt tails of Rob McElnea’s and Darrell Healey’s teams as well as the factory HM Plant Honda team, and we were in their shadow for a while. But we battled away, got some decent sponsorship and upped our game and before long we made that step up. We were building our own bikes and had started to get noticed, and that led to Yamaha coming to us with Andy Smith offering us a deal.
“That elevated us to the same level as our competitors and we ended up winning the championship with Tommy Hill in 2011. Things progressed fairly quickly for us from then on and we secured the sponsorship from Milwaukee Power Tools which was going to be a two, or a maximum of a three-year deal. For two of those three years, we were on the old bike so on the back foot again and at the end of those couple of years, Milwaukee could have left but we had the new R1 coming and we had a good feeling so we did a deal for 2015 with Josh Brookes and had a fairytale season as it turned out. Not only did we win the title for SMR, we won it for Milwaukee and importantly, for Yamaha on their brand new R1M.
“What pleased us most about both Tommy and Josh winning their respective titles was it was the first for both of them. It’s not as if we’d hired a Shakey-type rider with a number of championships under his belt already, we did it our way.”
Rough ride
With the number one plate secured, and a happy team, sponsor and manufacturer to go with it, many people would have thought the natural thing to do would be to stay in the UK and defend the title which had been won in dominant style. But not so as it transpired. “A lot of it