Cycle News

BMW MOTORRAD CEO STEPHAN SC HALLER P104 I N T E R V I E W ferred to invest the money we would have spent on going racing ourselves into widening our range of models, while not neglecting—and indeed strength- ening—our support for our Supersport customers. I'd rather put my money into helping BMW's Super- sport customers win a race trophy than support World Superbike activities with our own factory team, which costs a hell of money. Understood, but since you pulled out of rac- ing the Hypersport market has now suddenly exploded again after being dormant for three or four years, and you have Yamaha, Ducati and Aprilia producing new models to compete in this. BMW got its retaliation in first with the new S1000RR, but don't you feel the need to race that competitively? So as to demonstrate at the highest level on the race- track that this is the best bike in its sector? As I said, our customers come first, and when they go racing we will support them. Let me clearly state this—we will definitely not establish our road racing factory team again. Neither for MotoGP, nor for World Superbike. Because we prefer to invest that money in widening our product range, and supporting our customers. This is a very important segment for us and, our target is to be the best company in the future for supporting normal privateer riders. Therefore we will continue to invest in that seg- ment heavily, and that's only possible if we don't spend a large amount of money competing of- ficially in World Superbike or MotoGP. Where is BMW going in the future? With the arrival of the sub-500cc single-cylinder family which you're developing with TVS, BMW will have six distinct families of bikes, or maybe even seven, if you have a twin-cylinder one made in India… Do you foresee that this will continue to expand, or are you now going to focus on doing the best you can in those par- ticular model segments? Without any tremendous development effort we can use what we already have, and widen it still further. There are lots of smaller model segments it's possible to make without developing a complete new model platform. For example, within the next two years we'll have a Scrambler based on the R NineT, as well as a Café Racer. There are other examples of diversification within each of the other model families without extending their number further. Were you surprised by the success of the R NineT? We were not surprised to enter the Custom segment successfully with this bike, but to be honest it went well beyond our expectations. For this bike to race to number four in the list of bestsellers in BMW's entire range—after the GS and GS Adventure and the R1200RT—was completely unexpected. It was a nice surprise, although it gave us a good problem to catch up with production. We had lots of customer complaints that they wanted the bike, and had to wait four or five months to get one. The R NineT was created for you by Roland Sands—do you have him under contract to make other models? The answer is yes, we will work together with Roland Sands in this direction even more closely. He creates these wonderful motorcycles in terms of styling and flair, but they actually work, they are functional. They are not like so many other custom bikes that are just nice to look at, but you wouldn't want to ride one. Plus he's a great guy, not only in terms of his personality, but also from his intellect and his ability to understand motorcycles. And of course with BMW there's a huge base of potential customers for him to make money from. We have hundreds of thousands of bikes out there being ridden that he can find the right way to offer aftermarket parts to. CN "IF WE DID A V-TWIN WE DEFINITELY WOULD DO IT DIFFERENTLY, BUT WE ALSO HAVE OUR BMW HERITAGE AND PERHAPS THAT IS A MORE IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION."

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