Edwards Bored But Fourth

Henny Ray Abrams | June 27, 2009

Monster Yamaha Tech 3’s Colin Edwards equaled his best performance in what he described as the “most boring race,” the seventh round of the MotoGP World Championship in Assen, Holland.Edwards bolted to the front to mix it up with the front-runners before settling into a secure fourth place. And for most of the 26 laps he was alone, unable to match the pace of Rossi, Lorenzo, and Stoner, and well ahead of Chris Vermeulen. Still, he had to ride hard and his concentration was heightened later in the race when the front end warned him of trouble ahead. He wisely backed off and took the fourth, the same finishing position he’d begun the season with in Qatar.”I went faster than I went all weekend in the beginning on race tires and I was pushing,” he said. “We had a couple little spots where we seemed to lose a little bit, some wheelies and some stuff. And then the lap that [Andrea] Dovizioso crashed, which was, I think, lap 11 or something, the lap before in that turn three I had me a little, just like get in full lean and it was pumping. Like not a good feeling. Looking more right, but bike’s going more straight. And I felt right then, I thought, ‘Oh man, we’re losing a bit of grip here.’ So then really once that happened it’s all about adjusting, adjusting your style to figure out how to extract the same lap time with whatever you have and we couldn’t.”I’m a front-end guy, front confidence going in and you get a bit of movement and the lap times dropped off. Same with, obviously with Stoner in front of me, dropped off, and I think all of that is just that little bit of front end movement that nobody really likes. It seems to knock a dent in your confidence.”In fact Stoner was suffering the same type of illness which had struck unexpectedly two weeks ago in Catalunya. This time it was so severe that Stoner wasn’t able to attend the post-race press conference.”I spoke with the doctor,” Ducati Marlboro project director Livio Suppo said. “We tried to give him something this week to see what happens. Unfortunately, there’s a race just this week, so there’s not so much we can do, but hopefully with the help of Dr. Macchiagodena we can help him.”Edwards felt fine physically, but mentally he was struggling with his set-up.”We’re not real sure why we encountered this problem, because we hadn’t really had it this weekend, but you could definitely see that we, at the finish of the race, you could see the front tire was abused,” he said.