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a good read Ppls
Colin Edwards, a Houston native nicknamed "The Texas Tornado," will offer candid insight about his performance, competitors and life in the exciting world of MotoGP motorcycle racing before every event in 2009 in "Tornado Warning."
Two-time World Superbike champion Edwards, 35, is in his seventh year of MotoGP competition, riding this season for Yamaha Tech 3. He is sixth in the season standings after six races this season and will compete with the rest of the MotoGP grid at TT Assen on June 25-27 at Assen, Netherlands.
The colorful Edwards will compete in the second annual Red Bull Indianapolis GP on Aug. 28-30 at IMS along with fellow American MotoGP star Nicky Hayden, and MotoGP superstars Valentino Rossi, Casey Stoner, Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo.
Barcelona was another race with starting line troubles and front-end troubles. Are you getting any closer to a solution?
Yeah, I think we are. Before all of our winter testing and stuff, we had a certain length we were running the bike. And then we went to Qatar and we were running into some traction problems, so we shortened it up a little bit. And we never went back. It worked good at Qatar, but then we had a problem. And we never actually went back to our, let's say, the standard length. And that's more or less what Valentino (Rossi) and Jorge (Lorenzo) have been running all year. So we kind of stuck with what we had, and we've encountered this same type of problem throughout. In the rain, the weight was all the way to the rear; there was nothing on the front. At Jerez, whenever we had lack of rear traction, the front felt high. All the weight on the rear. And the same in Barcelona. So we changed the bike on Saturday morning, and the lap times were the same. We went back to let's say our standard-standard preseason testing setup. More or less kind of the length Valentino and Jorge are running. It felt OK, but we just didn't have the front grip we needed as far as tire. I went out there and crashed in the qualifying session. It just seemed early. I was going into the corner, I crashed way early. I wasn't even really into the apex where you normally lose the front. So we kind of did some thinking and going back and forth, and said let's just run what we know, what we've been using. I think Assen, we're going to start with the long one and just use it.
Do you ever get to a point where you run out of things that you can check and change? Are you close to that point, or are there still a lot of things you can adjust?
For instance, I've been having trouble all year starting the thing. All it does is wheelie, wheelie, wheelie. I can't keep the front wheel on the ground. We went back to the long rear length on Saturday at Barcelona, and I practiced a start, and man, that thing was like a rocket out of the hole. That traction keeps the front wheel on the ground better than the normal bike I"ve been using. For the start, it's definitely going to be better. We know that. I should at least be able to hold my position. It really has nothing to do with power why I can't hold, let's say, qualifying position into Turn 1. It's just a wheelie. I've got plenty of power; I just can't put the front wheel on the ground. Do we run out of things? No, man, I think when you run out of things, you may as well go home. If you run out of things to test and work on, you should be winning every race. The fastest out there every session, pole position every race, if that's the case. But you're always trying new things to find an advantage.
They sound like totally different problems, getting front-end grip and having good starts. But is there any correlation between the two because you like to keep that front end planted in the corners, and you also need to get your front end down on the starts. If you solve one problem, will a solution to the other one follow?
Yeah. This is maybe a little too technical, but if you imagine a perfect triangle, OK. The bottom two angles are your wheels, and the top one is your center of gravity on the bike. You've got your three points that you're working on. Well, as soon as you bring the rear closer in, you're basically opening that angle up, but it's getting off-center. So you're center of gravity is scooting back, but it's still high. So the only way to really combat that is to lower the bike to get that triangle back to the same and shorten the front, as well, to get the same, let's say, angle of the dangle. But ours is too short. We've got too much of a slope from the front to the center of gravity, and we've got more like a straight line coming down to the rear wheel, is what it feels like. Kind of an off-kilter triangle, which might be too difficult for people to understand. But it feels like a teeter-totter. You're sitting on top of it, and it's just rockin' back and forth. Does it correlate, front-end grip and the start? Absolutely. There's two problems we created when we went shorter, and that was the two problems.
I understand. I'm a writer, and I get it. So you're on to something.
Generally, every year I was with Valentino, if anybody was short, he was shorter than me - always. I'm not talking about 2 or 3 mil (millimeters). I mean, sometimes he was 10, 15, 20 mil shorter than I was. And there were good things and bad things about it. But the fact that he's running longer than me and has been, that just seems a little bit out of place. Generally, I ride the front a little bit harder than everybody else. I don't really sit my ... on the seat as hard as some other guys. I more or less transfer with the throttle. A lot of the things we did made sense why we did it, but I think we need to go back and regroup. I think for Assen it will be better to run a little bit longer, anyways. That place is pretty free-flowing, and it kind of transfers for you. You don't really need to have a short bike to get transfer.
Help me understand the relationship between a factory team like Fiat Yamaha and a satellite team like Yamaha Tech 3. When you get into a situation with a problem like this, can you as a satellite team go to the factory team for help?
That's a great question, but what I think a lot of people don't realize is that I have Yamaha engineers in my garage. I have guys that are paid by Yamaha, Japanese, that come to every race just for us. So whatever information those guys take back to the bullpen, where all of Yamaha, all the Japanese in their trailer, it can all come out in any direction. The engineers, they all talk, too. If we find something that works pretty good, well, the next thing you know, it filters back, and maybe one of the other guys tries it on the factory team. And then it works the other way, as well. The only one, let's say, James (Toseland), I don't know what he's doing. Jorge, I know he just likes to get on it and ride it. He tinkers with it, obviously, but I think he can go left, right, backward or forward with anything, and he just learns how to ride it. But he still needs to learn a little bit on how to set it up and get it perfect, whereas Valentino has always been real meticulous about that. A mil here, a mil there. That's kind of our bike is now. Hell, you change 1 mil on my bike, and I feel it. I should feel it, but it shouldn't feel like 4 mil, if you understand what I'm saying. It's very sensitive, our bike right now. All that information gets floated around. That's not really an issue.
That battle at Barcelona between Valentino and Jorge, you've been in a few of those yourself, especially against Bayliss at Imola in 2002 in World Superbike. Does your mindset as a rider change when you're in a battle like that? Do you focus more on beating the other guy any way you can or do you just concentrate on relaxing and hitting your marks as you would if you weren't going wheel to wheel?
In all honesty, you could ask Valentino this, you could ask Bayliss, you could ask whoever: It doesn't really happen as often as you'd like it to happen. When you get into that position, it's quite different if you're fighting for fourth and fifth. But when you're fighting for the win or fighting for the championship or whatever it may be, and you know that you're even-par, that nobody really has an engine advantage or a tire advantage like me and Bayliss or Jorge and Valentino last race, it's definitely a different mindset because you kind of throw everything out the window, and it just becomes mano a mano. If you pitch it down trying to win the race, well, how can you really complain about that? If you take both of you out, yeah, Yamaha is going to be pissed off. But at least you were trying. And if you win the race, you win the race. So there's really nothing to lose. You could lose 25 points and some bonus money if you pitch it down the road, but it's just kind of a statement, as well. I think the greatest thing about this last race is that Lorenzo's nickname is "Por Fuera" or something like that, which means "around the outside." That's his nickname, and he got that because he outbroke, I think it was Dani Pedrosa on 250s or 125s, I forget. But he went around the outside of him going into a corner. And if you saw, a few laps to go (in Barcelona), Valentino did exactly that to him. And Valentino doesn't do stupid things like that, coming into Turn 1. That was just a statement. That was just to show you, "Hey, that might be your nickname, but watch this."
Do you sense a growing rivalry between Valentino and Jorge at all?
I'm not going to say Valentino is scared. He's never been scared of anybody. I don't think his record is going to make anybody think he's scared. But Valentino has his own little things that he does, if it be intentionally or unintentionally, to kind of get under people's skin, especially rivals. Jorge, it doesn't work. I don't know how to explain it. He just doesn't let it affect him. I don't know how to explain it. He seems to go really well. But Jorge has got quite a persona himself. So he's not intimidated very much by Valentino.
How do you explain the passion and atmosphere of Assen to someone who doesn't follow MotoGP? What makes that place so special to all the riders?
I think they've done a good job to try and screw everything up after all the changes to the track, to be honest with you. Obviously, when I first starting going there on Superbikes, the track was just, whew, ahh, it was amazing. Every little part about that track was just amazing. If you messed up one corner, hell, it'd screw you up for four corners down the road. They've butchered it. I don't know, man. This gets back into politics and all this other stuff why they changed it. Hell, there's a motorcycle track there, and then people move in and start complaining about the noise. Go figure. If you didn't want to live by a motorcycle track, then pack your (stuff) and move on. You get enough people that complain, and next thing you know, they had to change the track for noise control. The track has been there for, hell, I don't know how many decades. Which is just, it's ridiculous why they had to change it. But welcome to socialism.
But it still has great atmosphere, doesn't it?
Oh, it is. I can't say it's not a good atmosphere. Was it better? Absolutely it was better in years past. I think now we're kind of riding in the wake of what it was. We're still holding on to, "Oh, it's just one of the most incredible GP's ever," when, yeah, you know, whatever. The track's just not what it was. I think everybody pretty much knows that. But it's still a great event. There's a lot of history behind it, but we're riding in the wake of that history and still trying to pump it up with all the history that it has had. It hasn't been made at this track; it's been made at another track.
Is there a temptation for you to look a bit past Assen because the following race is Laguna Seca, a track you know and love and where you should get a good result?
It's not temptation. I don't really feel like we've had … We've had either bad starts or jacked-up conditions. At Le Mans, I felt we should have run good. We had a rain map put in the bike for Motegi. I felt like we should have been fighting for the podium. I've had all these little things going on all year. It's like, "Can I just catch a break?" Assen, I go good at. Laguna, I go good at. Donington, I go good at. Hell, even Sachsenring, I've had a good race there. So I'm looking real forward to the next four races, in particular Laguna, Assen and Donington. There just three tracks out of the next four races that I just love. So I'm looking forward to a good run.
indy-speedway
Colin Edwards, a Houston native nicknamed "The Texas Tornado," will offer candid insight about his performance, competitors and life in the exciting world of MotoGP motorcycle racing before every event in 2009 in "Tornado Warning."
Two-time World Superbike champion Edwards, 35, is in his seventh year of MotoGP competition, riding this season for Yamaha Tech 3. He is sixth in the season standings after six races this season and will compete with the rest of the MotoGP grid at TT Assen on June 25-27 at Assen, Netherlands.
The colorful Edwards will compete in the second annual Red Bull Indianapolis GP on Aug. 28-30 at IMS along with fellow American MotoGP star Nicky Hayden, and MotoGP superstars Valentino Rossi, Casey Stoner, Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo.
Barcelona was another race with starting line troubles and front-end troubles. Are you getting any closer to a solution?
Yeah, I think we are. Before all of our winter testing and stuff, we had a certain length we were running the bike. And then we went to Qatar and we were running into some traction problems, so we shortened it up a little bit. And we never went back. It worked good at Qatar, but then we had a problem. And we never actually went back to our, let's say, the standard length. And that's more or less what Valentino (Rossi) and Jorge (Lorenzo) have been running all year. So we kind of stuck with what we had, and we've encountered this same type of problem throughout. In the rain, the weight was all the way to the rear; there was nothing on the front. At Jerez, whenever we had lack of rear traction, the front felt high. All the weight on the rear. And the same in Barcelona. So we changed the bike on Saturday morning, and the lap times were the same. We went back to let's say our standard-standard preseason testing setup. More or less kind of the length Valentino and Jorge are running. It felt OK, but we just didn't have the front grip we needed as far as tire. I went out there and crashed in the qualifying session. It just seemed early. I was going into the corner, I crashed way early. I wasn't even really into the apex where you normally lose the front. So we kind of did some thinking and going back and forth, and said let's just run what we know, what we've been using. I think Assen, we're going to start with the long one and just use it.
Do you ever get to a point where you run out of things that you can check and change? Are you close to that point, or are there still a lot of things you can adjust?
For instance, I've been having trouble all year starting the thing. All it does is wheelie, wheelie, wheelie. I can't keep the front wheel on the ground. We went back to the long rear length on Saturday at Barcelona, and I practiced a start, and man, that thing was like a rocket out of the hole. That traction keeps the front wheel on the ground better than the normal bike I"ve been using. For the start, it's definitely going to be better. We know that. I should at least be able to hold my position. It really has nothing to do with power why I can't hold, let's say, qualifying position into Turn 1. It's just a wheelie. I've got plenty of power; I just can't put the front wheel on the ground. Do we run out of things? No, man, I think when you run out of things, you may as well go home. If you run out of things to test and work on, you should be winning every race. The fastest out there every session, pole position every race, if that's the case. But you're always trying new things to find an advantage.
They sound like totally different problems, getting front-end grip and having good starts. But is there any correlation between the two because you like to keep that front end planted in the corners, and you also need to get your front end down on the starts. If you solve one problem, will a solution to the other one follow?
Yeah. This is maybe a little too technical, but if you imagine a perfect triangle, OK. The bottom two angles are your wheels, and the top one is your center of gravity on the bike. You've got your three points that you're working on. Well, as soon as you bring the rear closer in, you're basically opening that angle up, but it's getting off-center. So you're center of gravity is scooting back, but it's still high. So the only way to really combat that is to lower the bike to get that triangle back to the same and shorten the front, as well, to get the same, let's say, angle of the dangle. But ours is too short. We've got too much of a slope from the front to the center of gravity, and we've got more like a straight line coming down to the rear wheel, is what it feels like. Kind of an off-kilter triangle, which might be too difficult for people to understand. But it feels like a teeter-totter. You're sitting on top of it, and it's just rockin' back and forth. Does it correlate, front-end grip and the start? Absolutely. There's two problems we created when we went shorter, and that was the two problems.
I understand. I'm a writer, and I get it. So you're on to something.
Generally, every year I was with Valentino, if anybody was short, he was shorter than me - always. I'm not talking about 2 or 3 mil (millimeters). I mean, sometimes he was 10, 15, 20 mil shorter than I was. And there were good things and bad things about it. But the fact that he's running longer than me and has been, that just seems a little bit out of place. Generally, I ride the front a little bit harder than everybody else. I don't really sit my ... on the seat as hard as some other guys. I more or less transfer with the throttle. A lot of the things we did made sense why we did it, but I think we need to go back and regroup. I think for Assen it will be better to run a little bit longer, anyways. That place is pretty free-flowing, and it kind of transfers for you. You don't really need to have a short bike to get transfer.
Help me understand the relationship between a factory team like Fiat Yamaha and a satellite team like Yamaha Tech 3. When you get into a situation with a problem like this, can you as a satellite team go to the factory team for help?
That's a great question, but what I think a lot of people don't realize is that I have Yamaha engineers in my garage. I have guys that are paid by Yamaha, Japanese, that come to every race just for us. So whatever information those guys take back to the bullpen, where all of Yamaha, all the Japanese in their trailer, it can all come out in any direction. The engineers, they all talk, too. If we find something that works pretty good, well, the next thing you know, it filters back, and maybe one of the other guys tries it on the factory team. And then it works the other way, as well. The only one, let's say, James (Toseland), I don't know what he's doing. Jorge, I know he just likes to get on it and ride it. He tinkers with it, obviously, but I think he can go left, right, backward or forward with anything, and he just learns how to ride it. But he still needs to learn a little bit on how to set it up and get it perfect, whereas Valentino has always been real meticulous about that. A mil here, a mil there. That's kind of our bike is now. Hell, you change 1 mil on my bike, and I feel it. I should feel it, but it shouldn't feel like 4 mil, if you understand what I'm saying. It's very sensitive, our bike right now. All that information gets floated around. That's not really an issue.
That battle at Barcelona between Valentino and Jorge, you've been in a few of those yourself, especially against Bayliss at Imola in 2002 in World Superbike. Does your mindset as a rider change when you're in a battle like that? Do you focus more on beating the other guy any way you can or do you just concentrate on relaxing and hitting your marks as you would if you weren't going wheel to wheel?
In all honesty, you could ask Valentino this, you could ask Bayliss, you could ask whoever: It doesn't really happen as often as you'd like it to happen. When you get into that position, it's quite different if you're fighting for fourth and fifth. But when you're fighting for the win or fighting for the championship or whatever it may be, and you know that you're even-par, that nobody really has an engine advantage or a tire advantage like me and Bayliss or Jorge and Valentino last race, it's definitely a different mindset because you kind of throw everything out the window, and it just becomes mano a mano. If you pitch it down trying to win the race, well, how can you really complain about that? If you take both of you out, yeah, Yamaha is going to be pissed off. But at least you were trying. And if you win the race, you win the race. So there's really nothing to lose. You could lose 25 points and some bonus money if you pitch it down the road, but it's just kind of a statement, as well. I think the greatest thing about this last race is that Lorenzo's nickname is "Por Fuera" or something like that, which means "around the outside." That's his nickname, and he got that because he outbroke, I think it was Dani Pedrosa on 250s or 125s, I forget. But he went around the outside of him going into a corner. And if you saw, a few laps to go (in Barcelona), Valentino did exactly that to him. And Valentino doesn't do stupid things like that, coming into Turn 1. That was just a statement. That was just to show you, "Hey, that might be your nickname, but watch this."
Do you sense a growing rivalry between Valentino and Jorge at all?
I'm not going to say Valentino is scared. He's never been scared of anybody. I don't think his record is going to make anybody think he's scared. But Valentino has his own little things that he does, if it be intentionally or unintentionally, to kind of get under people's skin, especially rivals. Jorge, it doesn't work. I don't know how to explain it. He just doesn't let it affect him. I don't know how to explain it. He seems to go really well. But Jorge has got quite a persona himself. So he's not intimidated very much by Valentino.
How do you explain the passion and atmosphere of Assen to someone who doesn't follow MotoGP? What makes that place so special to all the riders?
I think they've done a good job to try and screw everything up after all the changes to the track, to be honest with you. Obviously, when I first starting going there on Superbikes, the track was just, whew, ahh, it was amazing. Every little part about that track was just amazing. If you messed up one corner, hell, it'd screw you up for four corners down the road. They've butchered it. I don't know, man. This gets back into politics and all this other stuff why they changed it. Hell, there's a motorcycle track there, and then people move in and start complaining about the noise. Go figure. If you didn't want to live by a motorcycle track, then pack your (stuff) and move on. You get enough people that complain, and next thing you know, they had to change the track for noise control. The track has been there for, hell, I don't know how many decades. Which is just, it's ridiculous why they had to change it. But welcome to socialism.
But it still has great atmosphere, doesn't it?
Oh, it is. I can't say it's not a good atmosphere. Was it better? Absolutely it was better in years past. I think now we're kind of riding in the wake of what it was. We're still holding on to, "Oh, it's just one of the most incredible GP's ever," when, yeah, you know, whatever. The track's just not what it was. I think everybody pretty much knows that. But it's still a great event. There's a lot of history behind it, but we're riding in the wake of that history and still trying to pump it up with all the history that it has had. It hasn't been made at this track; it's been made at another track.
Is there a temptation for you to look a bit past Assen because the following race is Laguna Seca, a track you know and love and where you should get a good result?
It's not temptation. I don't really feel like we've had … We've had either bad starts or jacked-up conditions. At Le Mans, I felt we should have run good. We had a rain map put in the bike for Motegi. I felt like we should have been fighting for the podium. I've had all these little things going on all year. It's like, "Can I just catch a break?" Assen, I go good at. Laguna, I go good at. Donington, I go good at. Hell, even Sachsenring, I've had a good race there. So I'm looking real forward to the next four races, in particular Laguna, Assen and Donington. There just three tracks out of the next four races that I just love. So I'm looking forward to a good run.
indy-speedway
