P22
IN
THE
WIND
MINI INTERVIEW: Stephane Fisher
S
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GOLD & GOOSE
tephane Fisher is
the technical director for BMW Motorrad Motorsport, which
means he's the technical director of BMW's
soon to be defunct
factory World Superbike team. We caught
up with Fischer at the
Laguna Seca round of
the championship last
week.
What did you learn
about BMW as a company or about the
machine in World Superbike now you will
leave as an official effort at the end of this The BMW factory team has had success in World Superbike.
year?
The exercise we did here experience of only five years team. I hope we will still be here
was a good success. The bike and I think we did a quite good in this paddock with customer
was coming out on the mar- job there, improving and learn- teams. We, as a company, will
ket and it was a success on a ing what is more ready to race continue racing because we unstandard level, a normal level. from the base of the bike and derstand it is part of our genetic
It was born before entering into also having more experience of code. It is part of our production.
racing. Then entering on that this paddock. You have these In theory you can spend money
high professional level in World two different inputs to deal with. going on test tracks, etc., but
Superbike, we understood Improving the pure bike and all you get a very quick feedback
that maybe something still was that we learned in the paddock. from racing to some very delimissing in the genetic code of My task now is bring this infor- cate questions. Some questions
cannot be answered here at the
the bike, to make it ready to mation to production.
Has racing improved the races, of course. Sometimes
race like maybe other manufacyou have to do 1000 dyno runs
turers who were already here. breed?
Absolutely, I can confirm that or other tests in other ways. But
We made good steps considering we were young in racing 100 percent. We do not step if you have dedicated questions
- if you compare us to people out of racing now; we have just about performance, racing gives
like Honda, having ages - de- stepped out of this application you very quick feedback.
cades - of racing. We had an of World Superbike as a factory
Gordon Ritchie