First dates aren’t easy
Michael Neeves finally gets to race his new Beemer, but it’s not all chequered flags and podiums at Brands Hatch…
Two years after those nice people at Prime Factors Racing ordered a ‘Gen 4’ (model name K67, as I recently discovered) BMW SRR for me to race, and now I am finally sat on a sopping wet, early October Brands Hatch grid. Ready to go…
BMW production delays and the Covids have buggered-up the last couple of seasons, but I manage to squeeze in at the final round of the MRO Powerbike championship and treat the weekend as a test.
In race trim the new RR works very differently to the old bike, so we’ve had help along the way from Alpha Racing, HM Racing and Crowe Performance. We’ve also worked some of it out for ourselves, but it’s been a slow process during three trackdays over the summer.
When I first rode it I felt so at sea with the suspension, race kit electronics and the way it has to be ridden with its split throttle bodies, I thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew. I couldn’t even work out how the lap timer on our fancy new Motec dash worked.
Whether you’re turning your SRR into a trackday tool, WSB racer or anything in between, you can get everything you need from BMW’S technical partner, Alpha Racing. They’ll even give you advice on set-up and they hold seminars at their factory near Munich to show you how a race RR ticks.
Their kit is aimed at professional teams and race engineers, not some numpty from Margate, so they assume you’ll know the basics. They’re always happy to answer questions, but the hard thing is knowing the right one to ask. It’s taken me months to realise the lap timer only works once you’ve connected the bike to a computer via a special cable and tell it what track you’re at. And now I know you need three kinds of software to manipulate the dash, work the datalogger and fiddle with the ECU settings.
It rains at Brands all weekend and it’s the first time I’ve ridden the bike on Pirelli wets. An 8th, 10th and DNF (thanks to a fogged-up visor – rookie mistake) isn’t a dream start
‘When I first rode it… I thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew’
but I come away having learnt lots and realising just what a weapon this new bike is going to be when all the planets eventually align. The way it handles and its speed down the straights is insane. Roll on and a bit less Brands Hatch rain, if you don’t mind.