Colin in the points at Phillip Island

The 16th round of the season comes to an end with NGM Mobile Forward Racing rider Colin Edwards in 12th place at the Tissot Australian Grand Prix. This tire performance at Phillip Island forced race direction to make the Australian GP have a flag-to-flag race, forcing the riders to have to change bikes mid race. 

All through out the weekend Colin Edwards has proven to be the fastest CRT man at Phillip Island with his FTR – Kawasaki bike, registering incredible lap times of 1´29.827 during FP3. The fast race pace lead to believe he could fight for top CRT but unfortunately the race format used in the Australian island did not allow for it to happen. Nonetheless Edwards has now secured his second place on the CRT championship standing. 

The last of the three back-to-back races takes the championship to Motegi for the 17th round of the season next week. The American rider remains confident for the upcoming race and looking forward to it.

Colin Edwards:

“Strange kind of race, knowing that you are going into a race in which you are going to have to break concentration, change bikes and refocus, it’s just strange. Even the feeling on the grid, sitting on the starting line you think its just a normal race but you know its about to be interrupted in nine laps. I got a good start, made a mistake on the first lap and Dovizioso got by me. A second mistake allowed Randy to pass me too, all silly braking errors that I made on the first lap. When I got clear and got going I did the lap times I knew I could do and started to hunt the guys down before the pit stop. I don’t know what happened in the pits, I was doing the speed limit, came in, changed bikes, speed limit back out and for some reason they were three to four seconds in front of me. My second bike wasn’t near as good as my first bike, we had a little bit of chatter with the second bike and something with the butterfly linkage on the throttle seems a little weird on the second bike and it took me a few laps to get comfortable. I never had the lap times on the second bike as I did on the first one. Thanks to my guys, we had a good weekend and we look forward to having a good weekend in Japan next week.” 

Sergio Verbena, MotoGP Technical Director:

“It has been a rather unusual race, having to do a flag-to-flag race due to the problems with the tires. We are happy with Colin’s 12th place, he has taken four more points and we have secured our second place as best CRT in the championship standing. Had we race under normal conditions we had the pace to be first CRT as proven by our FP3, Q2 and warm up lap times. In all fairness Colin has not struggled with the tires but Claudio has. While being on his first bike Claudio started to feel the degradation of the tires only just a few laps into the race and the same happened once he changed to his second bike. He was unable to make the result that he disserved based on the weekend lap times. We head to Japan knowing that there are only two more races left. We hope to finish the season maintaining the same level and looking forward to the following season.”