Henny Ray Abrams | April 12, 2009
Monster Energy Yamaha Tech 3’s Colin Edwards said the torrential downpours that forced the postponement of the 2009 Qatar Grand Prix were “jacked up.”” I mean, y’know we’re in the middle of the desert,” the sixth fastest qualifier for the season-opener said at the Losail International Circuit. “The last thing you would think is it’s going to piss down rain. I think they said it rains usually three days a year or something here. One day in the test and yesterday and today, so there’s the three days. I’m going to blame it on the Europeans. I think they brought it all over here. I don’t know, what do you do? You just sit around until they make a decision.”The decision was taken to postpone the race for a day. But before he got wind of it, Edwards had a practical reason for wanting to race. “Of course I would, but my flight’s not ‘til Tuesday morning,” he said. “I mean, if the tides were changed and I was like most of these people, you know, economic times that we’re in, a lot of these guys are using their miles or upgrading or using their own money. So a lot of guys already checked in. So you got to look at if we run the race tomorrow, well, Dorna’s going to get their money, but I think they need to reimburse everybody for having to change their… I don’t know. It’s a bummer. It really is.”Edward said the track’s location, in the desert east of the Qatari capital of Doha, should have assured a dry race. The average annual rainfall for Doha is less than three inches. And yet the rain was coming down in sheets from just before the start of the MotoGP warm-up lap.”Well, I pulled up to the grid, I saw a drop and thought, ‘Well maybe it’s just whatever from long away,'” Edwards said. “Sure enough, when it started raining, all I was thinking about was keeping the water out of my visor, but then after it set in I thought, ‘Oh, crap, here we go.'”I don’t know. What can you do? Y’know, you used to wake up every morning before a race and look out the window, it’d be raining, I’d be like, ‘Oh crap.’ Now I look out and it’s like, whatever. I can’t do anything about it.”
Henny Ray Abrams | Contributing Editor
Abrams is the longest-serving contributor at Cycle News. Over the course of his 35-some years of writing and shooting photos, he’s covered events from MotoGP to the Motocross World Championship - and everything in between.
