The BMW Motorrad WorldSBK Team Gets New Chairs

Motorcycle racing is often a serious business, but there are a few reasons to enjoy the news that the BMW Motorrad WorldSBK team gets new chairs. Well, riders Tom Sykes and Eugene Laverty do, at least. There’s no word on what the rest of the team will be sitting on throughout the coming season.

The justification for BMW sharing the seat news is that the chairs are not your typical home office choice. As factory BMW riders have access to BMW M cars, it was decided to create some custom BMW M chairs for Sykes and Laverty.

As an upmarket approach to raiding the local scrapyard, the two seats were picked from the optional equipment list for a BMW M4 Competition, with Merino leather covers. And weighing 30kg each, they were converted into chairs by Alois Widbiller, Head of System Integration Seats, and his team at the BMW Research Centre in Munich.

There’s always something wonderful about the finer details in motorcycle racing. The beauty of a weld that’s invisible unless all the bodywork is removed, or the spotless garages without a spanner or nut laying on the floor.

So it’s hard not to both question, and appreciate, the level of detail applied to creating two chairs.

“That is really complex, as you cannot simply mount the seat on castors,” Widbiller explained. “For example, we had to design and produce special connecting pieces. They included an adapter, which we screw into the seat to form the connection with the rolling base. In the case of the rolling base, it was important to us that it sat nice and low to give both riders the most comfortable seating position possible. And the two chairs have obviously also been given a plaque with the words ‘BMW Motorrad WorldSBK Team’. It is located where the inside of the seat would be in a car. We had space there, and designed a special cover, on which we could mount the plaque.”

The level of detail was justifed by Sykes and Laverty also visiting the BMW research centre and meet staff while picking up their new chairs. Which certainly beats having to stand in a queue in Argos, before realising you can’t fit an office chair onto a pillion seat very easily.

And in explaining the need for high quality seats, it also inadvertantly makes motorcycle racing sound a bit less athletic and tiring than you might imagine.

“People often underestimate how much time our riders actually spend sitting in the garage,” confirmed BMW Motorrad Motorsport Director Marc Bongers. “This is particularly true during practice sessions. Before they take to the track, they prepare for their outings. Between runs they return to the garage and, while the crew works on the bike, the riders chat to their crew chiefs and engineers and give feedback on the bike. After all the sessions, including qualifying and the race, they head straight to the debrief with the team, in which all the details of how the bike responded in individual sections of the track are discussed and sector times are analysed. All that forms the basis for our set-up work during a race weekend. And the riders obviously also spend the final few minutes before they take to the grid in their garage, where they enter their final phase of concentration.”

So as the World Superbike championship resumes at Jerez on July 31st-August 2nd, there’s something truly wonderful about the fact BMW has devoted time and effort to create some custom chairs for riders who spend more time than you might think sat around at a race track.

For our non-chair related motorcycle racing articles, click here.