Q: Barcelona was another race with starting line troubles and front-end troubles. Are you getting any closer to a solution?
Colin Edwards: 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.
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Q: 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?
Colin Edwards: 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.”
Q: 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?
Colin Edwards: 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.
Q: 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?
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Colin Edwards: 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.
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