Edwards Unhappy with Seventh in Spain

Henny Ray Abrams | June 14, 2009

Monster Yamaha Tech 3’s Colin Edwards finished seventh in the Catalunya Grand Prix with continuing front grip problems on his YZF-M1.From sixth on the grid, Edwards was consumed going into the first turn and finished the first lap in ninth, “so it’s a hard pill to swallow and you do everything right, but you lose three, four positions.”After the his rear tire performance began to drop-lap five was his fastest-Edwards was into the low 1:44’s and so consistent that there was only .007 secs. difference between consecutive laps.”We had a very similar pace to (Loris) Capirossi and (Dani) Pedrosa in front of us, and sure, we lost some time having to pass (Toni) Elias and (Randy) De Puniet and (Mika) Kallio and all those guys, but it was just damage control,” he said. “What we had this morning that was just totally awesome, we had grip, we had feel. Not feel, I had feel even in the race, we just had so much grip.”Edwards said in the morning warm-up he could “chuck it in the corner and you had rear grip, which in turn gave you front load, so you could turn the thing. And in the race, it was just marbles. Just like yesterday, just like Friday. We changed a couple things yesterday, I crashed obviously trying a new setting. We went back to what we know. worked good this morning. Go to a hotter temperature and the harder tires. To get front weight to get turned, you’ve got to have rear let’s rear push. You have to have something to stop on the rear in order to load the front.”That’s what we were doing all day. My corners were not the arc. They were go in, straight line, get to the curb, spin it, and then go.” Since that wasn’t possible, Edwards said he was “riding the whole race with one arm behind my back, because it’s tactical after that. You have to brake a little bit earlier just in order to carry as much momentum as possible, try to get a good drive, but you can’t push. You try and push, the straighter you go and the further off line you go.”We had this problem in Jerez, we had it in Le Mans in the rain, and Mugello in the rain, so finally I’m going to say I think we understand where we went wrong and it all goes back to Qatar. Qatar we had a little traction issue, we shortened the bike up even more, but we had good grip. Here we don’t have good grip. Rain we didn’t have good grip. So we’re going to back to kinda what we were testing on in the beginning of the year. Assen should be good.”