Colin Edwards: “I’m Riding Motorcycles and I Feel Good”

Larry Lawrence | August 17, 2013

Photography by Larry Lawrence

INDIANAPOLIS (Aug. 17, 2013) – Forward Racing is an apt name for the team Colin Edwards is riding for. Things are moving forward nicely for Edwards and the team, which uses an FTR Kawasaki-powered CRT machine. On Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Edwards made it into the final MotoGP qualifying session (Q2) for the first time. Smiles were in abundance inside the NGM Mobile Forward Racing garage.

Edwards was the only CRT bike to make the final session and  will start 12th after turning a time of 1:40.372 on the IMS MotoGP road course. It was his best qualifying performance of the season.

He said he was surprised how easy the lap times came once on a soft tire.

“I knew from the beginning a soft tire wouldn’t work, so we just set the bike up for a hard tire,” Edwards said, talking about earlier sessions on the bike. “This afternoon when it was like ‘put the soft tires on and go,’ the first lap was a 40.9 and I thought, ‘That was easy.’”

Edwards said some minor changes to the set up was all the bike needed. He added that this kind of qualifying performance does wonders for the morale of the team.

“You look back from where we started,” he said. “It seems like, you know, Assen and then Germany and Laguna, we just slowly have been getting better and better. That’s just taking everything we’re learning and putting it on the bike. We’re at a place now that we show up to a track and we have a baseline. That’s the biggest thing with any CRT bike, is finding a baseline. If you can’t find one then you’re always up and down, left, right… We’ve got a pretty good package right now.”

Edwards was in his garage looking at the timing screens when the session ended.

“I did that 40.3 with four or five minutes to go,” he said. “I knew when I did it I was like, ‘Shit, I need another tire for the second session.’ And that’s the best lap I could possibly do. I just hit all the marks, so I came in and sat out for the last couple of minutes because I couldn’t do any better. I mean I can go throw it in the gavel for you if you want me to, but it all worked out.”

Larry Lawrence | Archives Editor

In addition to writing our Archives section on a weekly basis, Lawrence is another who is capable of covering any event we throw his way.