Forward Racing

A Sunday to be forgotten by the NGM Mobile Forward Racing Team and Colin Edwards that on the very last lap of the Catalunya GP he was forced to enter pits with a problems that has yet to be studied in detail.

Nonetheless from the very beginning it was a complicated race; the weather conditions being different from the two previous days, the clutch of the Suter-BMW suffered from the very first turn while Edwards’s pace was good enough to be with the other CRTs up until the very last laps.

A pity after all the work done this weekend by the rider and the team which resulted in qualifying as the second best CRT for the race yesterday. The main focus now is Silverstone where Colin wants to make up for the weekend’s result.

Colin Edwards – DNF

“I went out there today and did my best. Started changing the gears, going up through the gearbox and the clutch started slipping and I wasn’t going anywhere. Everybody passed me on the straight into turn one. I got going and the bike just felt so different than it did yesterday: tires reacting differently to the cooler temperature, couldn’t get them to stick in the bike it just felt so stiff. The only way to steer the bike was with the throttle. Getting in the corner we were lacking a lot of grip. I had to ride a lot different to how I did yesterday to try to survive and managed by slowly trying to keep the pace. The tire dropped off and I dropped off a bit and coming our it Turn 11, with five or six laps to go it just kind of stopped, full throttle but no rpms, nothing was happening and I knew something broke so I thought: “well, the bike is still going so I’ll try to survive the last couple of laps in case something happens and I can get points.” In the last lap on turn four it just quit completely and I would do about 3 miles/hour no matter what I did with the throttle, wouldn’t even make it to the finish line so I just came in the pits. It wasn’t a good weekend for us. We’ve got some work to do, figure some things out and we are going to Silverstone which is a track I like a lot so I’m looking forward to that.”

Sergio Verbena – Crew Chief

“It has been a complicated race. We had a problem with some component; we have yet to check what happened. Until Colin had a problem he was doing the exact same lap time that the other CRTs, which means we were not far off. We have made significant improvements even though we still have to work to continue the development. But the priority right now is to understand what has happened today during the race, analyze the data and prevent this problem from happening again in future races."