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Just two months shy of the start of the 2014 FIM Endurance World Championship, and BMW Motorrad has announced that it will not be continuing support of Team Thevent, the Belgian racing outfit that has in the past run BMW’s EWC effort.

Despite finishing a disappointing 12th in the 2013 season, Team Prinicipal Michael Bartholemy said the decision from BMW came as a shock given they had been involved in ongoing negotiations with BMW Motorrad for the 2014 season.

“We were asked by BMW Motorrad at Le Mans if we would continue in 2014, to which our answer was a definite yes,” he said. “Since then we have been negotiating in good faith, with BMW, with riders and with Pirelli, while BMW clarified internally some technical issues with the bike we would race in 2014.”

“Finally the budget was agreed with BMW, but just 24 hours later we got a call from them saying that they were sorry, but there was no budget and they weren’t going racing.”

Whether your four-wheeled racing fetish comes in the form of NASCAR or Formula One (maybe you tick the box for “other”?), chances are that you are accustomed to the concept of a pitstop. The idea is a bit lost on motorcycle racing though, as most circuit-racing is done on a single-tank of gasoline, e.g. MotoGP, WorldSBK, AMA Pro Racing, BSB, etc. At road racing events, like the Isle of Man TT though, pitstops become again the status quo, but the nature of the TT fails to bring a certainly level of sophistication to the process — the same cannot be said for the World Endurance Championship.

We already showed you today the oddity of a motorcycle chasing down a headlight on a race track, and we’ll bring you another interesting video from the WEC: a bonafide well-choreographed motorcycle pitstop. Showing us here a nearly textbook refueling, tire change, and rider swap, BMW Motorrad France Team Thevent’s total time in the pitbox was 17 seconds (a few seconds lost to some trouble getting the refueling system hooked up to the bike). Not bad.

With riders Sébastien Gimbert, Damian Cudlin, Erwan Nigon, and Hugo Marchand finishing second in the FIM World Endurance Championship, and third at Le Mans (a crash by Gimbert two hours into the race took the team off its pole-setting pace, and dashed hopes for an outright Championship win), the upstart French team is representing its German brand well. Hopefully they will be back next year to give those boys at SERT another run for their money.