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After three free practice sessions in the rain, during the qualifying at the Spanish Grand Prix, the sun made an appearance while leaving the track wet. After having worked all weekend long on a setup for rain for the Suter-BMW bike, the team NGM Mobile Forward Racing ad Colin Edwards have been constrained to readapt the bike according to the data from the March winter test.
The first half of the session has not been completely negative for Edwards up until the crash, when the American rider lost control of his prototype bike and had to be taken back by scooter to the pits. The lost time and the wet/dry conditions have forced the Texan rider to have to redouble the efforts at tomorrow’s warm up.
Colin Edwards
“We first went out in the morning and the wet patches conditions were atrocious. I saw the rain cloud coming and I tried to stick in a lap, maybe a little bit too risky and went into turn one, hit a wet patch and the rear end came around and spit me off the bike. Luckily I got off pretty gentle, came back to the pit and got on the second bike. Which when we went out this morning, I said that something felt a little bit different with the throttle control, electronics. We then went out and had some major issues, but we still tried to get going. The bike setting, the electronics and chatter were a big problem on the second bike. The first bike felt pretty good, we will get it back together and I’m sure that the one we will race tomorrow.”
Kornelis Veldeman – Crew Chief
“Mainly the problem is that we struggle with this circumstances, we have to find the right setting for the bike in the rain and it hasn’t been easy. We have had issues with the electronics, especially in these circumstances it is very sensitive and we miss the little bit of experience at the moment to solve this problems. The first outing with bike 1, he crashed due to a wet spot and luckily it was not a bad crash but still needed to continue the session with bike 2. On bike 2 the problem was the electronics, they didn’t work as expected and we were unable to improve our lap time. For tomorrow morning we will go out to the warm up with the bike 1 setting and be ready for the race in the afternoon.”
Marco Curioni – Managing Director
We are suffering the consequences of being early stages of development of our bike. We were aware of the fact that we would encounter difficulties here at Jerez and we have done very few tests in rain conditions. Obviously the crash did not help given that the second bike already had problems in terms of the electronics. We will work to solve these problems and to prepare a good setup and I stress the fact that we are currently suffering the consequences of the lack of experience, working wise, with the bike.
NGM Forward Racing Press Release
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