Colin Edwards statement at at the pre-event press conference at Laguna Seca last August caused a lot of laughter and flurry when he described his woes with the BMW-Suter with his usual candor: “My bike is a piece of shit, that’s a better way to say it.
It’s been tough.
Obviously some of the things that we were promised… we had our ass smacked and our balls tickled and they just haven’t come to fruition.
Some of the things that we were promised… it just hasn’t happened.
I’m not only trying to race the bike, but I also have to do 100 percent of the development.
We don’t have anybody there… we have this big window with electronics and everything and you have to get it down to a small point and let’s go fine tune it.
We’re not even there yet and it’s halfway through the year.
”Evidently that didn’t go down very well Eskil Suter, the man behind the CRT machine, who apparently even went as far as try riding the bike himself (the 45-year old Suter is a former racer and test rider) which resulted in a totaled bike and some sort of injury (this hasn’t been officially confirmed, because Colin Edwards tweeted the news and then turned around and said he was being a smart ass).
What is true is that in an interview with German website Speedweek.
de published the other day, Suter hit back against Edwards with, “Colin isn’t a tornado, but more a gentle breeze.
” According to the brief article the chassis maker actually pulled out the 2011 Brno test data to prove his point saying, “Look, Mika Kallio was testing the machine at Brno last year and he was 5km faster in every turn than Edwards is now, and Mika was using a weaker engine then.
It’s about courag,e not about traction control.
”NGM Forward announced on Friday – that Edwards was staying on for another season – that despite continuing problems and negative comments and having their rider test other CRTs during the Brno test, they will stick with BMW-Suter for the rest of season, and according to Suter, the Italian team still owes him 430.
000 euros.
Danilo Petrucci’s team has dropped their Ioda TR003 and debuted the BMW-Suter at Misano this weekend and will continue with machine in 2013, and he finished 14th and was lapped, while Edwards was 11th, but more than one minute and sixteen seconds from race winner Jorge Lorenzo and seven seconds slower that the best CRT rider Randy de Puniet.
The CRTs still have a long way to go and maybe the spec ECU unit supplied by Magneti Marelli that will be introduced next year could help performance levels.
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