BMW’s customer teams should have been racing for several months by this point in the year. However, as for nearly all racing organizations, the global coronavirus pandemic has meant a longer winter break than anticipated.
Ahead of the return to racing, Ahmet Köseleci, team manager at European GT4 outfit Borusan Otomotiv Motorsport, discusses what the BMW Motorsport customer team has been working on during lockdown.
How are you and the team doing in these times?
Borusan Otomotiv Motorsport, founded in 2008, has many branches, such as BOM Akademi for sharing our team’s experience with participants, BOM Karting for discovering and supporting young talents, and BOM E-Team to, again, discover talents and represent our country abroad, also in sim racing.
In this period, while our preparations for the new season were going on, of course with some difficulties caused by the pandemic for the first three organisations, BOM E-Team continued regardless. Beside our 2020 championship, we organised many online events as races and hotlaps. As a team we participated in championships and races, especially with the aim of fundraising for Covid-19 research.
In what areas have you been able to work over the past months?
Our team, in our carefully prepared and controlled workshop, continued to work on our cars, of course in restricted hours. All the members of our team have never had so much rest and never had this much time to get so bored!
We are used to start our season in March or April, so we really are looking forward to being on track again. Imola [where the season starts on July 25] is one of our favourite tracks and we will be racing there for the seventh time, and we are very happy because it will be the first race of the season. As the tracks in Turkey are not opened yet for the tests, we still were not able to go on track. In the workshop side we are ready.
What makes the GT4 European Series a special, attracting championship to compete in?
Borusan Otomotiv Motorsport is the only ‘all Turkish’ team participating in international races. We always prefer to be in competitive environments which give our team members more experience. We are following the full GT4 European Series for the third year in a row, and this will be the first time we will be competing with two cars. We want to be more competitive in the overall teams’ ranking.
