Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/425612
IN THE WIND P22 PHOTOGRAPHY BY GOLD & GOOSE BMW RACE TROPHY EXPANDS FOR 2015 I n 2014, BMW made a unique attempt at a worldwide competition to enhance the pro- file and results of the teams who opted to use the S1000RR in most forms of racing around the world. Next year the competition is be- ing expanded to include the U.S. and other championships. In 2015 there will also be a team event, and extra bonuses for riders who win their respective classes outright. This year the free-to-enter BMW Race Tro- phy was contested between 69 BMW Motor- rad privateers from 20 different countries, rid- ing in 15 different championships. The top 20 were invited to a BMW Motorrad Motorsport celebration in Munich on Saturday November 22nd to receive their trophies and a share of the total giveaway of 100,000 Euros. The top 20 hailed from 12 different countries and nine different championships. IDM rider Markus Reiterberger from Ger- many, who also competed on a BMW in the Endur- ance World Championship, won the main trophy and a check for 20,000 Euros. The BMW party included the prize presentation itself, musical interludes from former double World Superbike Champion James Toseland and expla- nations as to why the prizes got handed out the way they did. The scoring system seemed impossible to work out from outside when the series was launched early in 2014, but it is based on how many wins or podiums each rider got compared to how many races there were in each rider's season. It is a ratio of wins and podiums compared to how many races the championship contained. "The basic idea is that you bring the different num- ber of races into one ranking," said Bertie Hauser, BMW's customer racing boss. "That means that any rider, when he or she is winning, can score the same points as people from another championship. There are some different factors between different championships. The advantage for Markus Reiterberger (the 2014 Race Trophy winner) was that he was also racing once in WEC and won the class, so that gave him a big push upwards. Otherwise the result would have been completely different. If Mi- chael Dunlop had won Macau, for example, he would have been the BMW trophy winner." There will be an even clearer scoring system for 2015 because in 2014 the calculations made for some strange results on the face of it. A star like Ryuichi Kiyonari, who almost won the highly visible and prestigious British Superbike Championship for Buildbase BMW, was only 14th in the overall BMW Trophy rankings, but 17-year-old Austrian Marco Nekvasil, who was the main force in IDM's Superstock 1000 category, took third place. Gordon Ritchie German Superbike Championship (IDM) rider Markus Reiterberger earned top honors in the BMW Race Trophy competition.