2013 World Superbike
For the 2013 World Superbike Championship, Marco Melandri will be spearheading BMW’s efforts with the all-new BMW Motorrad GoldBet SBK team.
This effort is based out of Melandri’s native Italy and not Germany like the 2012 BMW Motorrad team. Whereas the GoldBet team was a privateer effort in 2012 (BMW Italia GoldBet), for 2013 it will receive full factory backing for the S1000RR’s engines and electronics.
Although there appears to be work still to do in finding weekend-on-weekend consistency of machine performance from the highly-oversquare if “conventional” four-cylinder BMW machine, Melandri made progress on the new-for-2013 17-inch tires at a recent Jerez test.
When asked by WorldSBK.com if the outside view of the official BMW bike – that when works well it works very well, but that it maybe has a smaller window of perfection than some other machines – Melandri says, “I think our bike is a very good bike but, like you say, the window to make it work and give you good confidence is very small. When you are inside this window you can be fast and it looks easy. When something is not perfect and you go out of this window you fight with the bike sometimes. I think this is the main place where we have to work, to make the bike easier. We knew this before the season, we know now. The first year was to try to understand what we have to do more on the bike. So for the first year, for sure we did more than was expected last season.”
Melandri’s indication that he and his team possibly over-performed in 2012, right up to what was a final ranking of third, with six individual race wins along the way, showed just how much progress was made last year. Not being champions after entering 2012 a season with no prior race wins for the S1000RR does not point to a lack of ambition or improvement in the entire project.
The secret of success in 2013 for Melandri and BMW’s new-look official team?
Marco Melandri says: “I think everything is a package. Rider, team, bike, factory – all together. For sure the rider may be on top and he must try to stimulate and push the team and give the right information. Then the team has to push the factory and the factory has to understand the information an what to do with the bike. I think it is always teamwork. Alone, the rider or team or factory cannot do this.”
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