After courting several established teams in the AMA Pro road racing paddock, BMW of North America has decided to not race its new S1000RR sportbike in the 2010 AMA Pro American Superbike Championship. “It’s no secret that we talked to a lot of teams in the paddock and got way down the road with negotiations with a few of them to see if we could find a way to make it work,” Todd Andersen, Manager, Marketing, BMW of North America told Roadracingworld.com, “but the realities of the current market situation came to bear and we decided that for, more than anything, financial reasons that this is probably not the year for us to go road racing. We haven’t given up on the idea. We’re going to take another hard look at it for 2011 and hopefully we’ll be able to do it then. We want to do it, but we want to do it right. “We, we meaning the U.S. team, very much wanted to get into racing. We feel that if you’re going to launch a sportbike, especially a Superbike, that to build creditability with consumers you’ve got to race it. The bike’s a racebike with lights, for goodness sakes. We were very committed to finding a way to go racing. “We looked at it and to do it right in the United States the amount of money that you need to bring to the table to have an effective Championship run was beyond what we felt we could invest in this marketplace. “We’ve had quite a few opportunities to get in bed with some smaller teams and do something a little more toward the privateer end, but we feel being a significant OEM with a lot of creditability on the line when we do race this bike we think it’s important that we do it with a full-on effort. And if we can’t do it with a full-on effort we’re going to sit on the sidelines and watch because we don’t want to do it halfway. “Just like you’ve seen in World Superbike. We didn’t go to World Superbike and dabble. We went to World Superbike and gave it everything we had and we’re continuing to invest even more in that with the hiring of [new Team Manager Davide] Tardozzi. We’re there to try to win, and if we decide to try to race in the U.S. we’re going to go and try to win.” BMW of North America will participate in the Parts Canada Superbike Championship with the S1000RR in 2010, but Andersen said that Canada’s market was managed by a separate team and that the economics of racing in Canada were different than in the U.S.