Tornado Warning: Grand Prix Of Portugal


Thursday, April 10, 2008

Colin Edwards, a Houston native nicknamed "The Texas Tornado," will offer candid insight before every MotoGP event in 2008 about the characteristics of the upcoming circuit, his tactics and possible motorcycle setup for the weekend, the personalities and rivalries of the exciting world of MotoGP, and personal anecdotes about the region where each event takes place in "Tornado Warning."

Two-time World Superbike champion Edwards, 34, is in his sixth year of MotoGP competition, riding this season for Yamaha Tech 3.

The colorful Edwards will compete in the inaugural Red Bull Indianapolis GP on Sept. 12-14 at IMS along with fellow American MotoGP stars Nicky Hayden and John Hopkins, and MotoGP superstars Valentino Rossi, Casey Stoner, Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo.

Estoril has tight corners but also has long straights. How do you set up a bike to run there?

It's kind of a really strange track. I should have won there. In 2006, I should have won. I was trying to play the good teammate thing; I was trying to let Valentino get away. In 2004, I had a good shot. The track is somewhere I have pretty good memories about. I have a good feeling for the track. The track, as far as setup, it's not really that much different than most tracks. It's got some cambered stuff and some off-camber stuff. You just try to find a happy medium. I don't care where you run; you can never get your bike perfect. You're always sacrificing something to gain something, or you're looking for corner speed or you're looking for traction. Three's nothing really special you have to do. You have a couple of hard braking places, but that's about it.

Does Estoril ride any different on an 800cc MotoGP bike than it did on a 990cc bike?

Pretty much everywhere is different riding on an 800 than a 990. Corner speeds are up, are a lot higher than they were on the 990, and you obviously don't have the grunt. The second thing about the 800 is that if you get it in a bit hot, you don't have the grunt to square it up and cover that time you just lost. On the 800, if you get in a bit hot, you usually lose time. It doesn't matter if you're squared up or trying to continue the momentum, you're going to lose a bit of time if you make a small mistake.

Are you running the pneumatic-valve engine at Estoril?

Yeah. We've got the new engine coming, which I'm really excited about. At Qatar, we were sitting in the top five easy, and at Jerez, we should have finished on the podium, if not fought for the win. Our bike is that good, even with the slower engine. But as soon as you get somebody in front of you, road-blocking you, you can't carry the momentum in the corners, you can't get close enough to out-brake them at the end of the straights. I don't care who you are in this series; you're not going to out-brake anyone from five or 10 lengths back. It just doesn't happen.

What's the difference between a pneumatic-valve engine and a conventional valve-spring engine?

A valve spring engine, it's actuated by the con (connecting) rod that's flipping it over, and that spring is pushing the rod down, but the problem is that once you get a certain amount of rpm, you create what we call valve bounce or valve floating. When you're doing 18,000 or 19,000 rpm, the spring is not quick enough to get the valve back for it to actuate again. What a pneumatic valve is, it's a little air tank. It's all air. As it actuates the valve, it's instant. There's no valve bounce, no floating going on.

Does a pneumatic-valve engine change the torque curve or characteristics of the bike?

I think as far as engine is concerned, once you have the system sorted out, which it looks like they do, it probably is a lot more reliable because you don't have anything floating around in there, nothing to go wrong. Obviously, if you lose air pressure, you've got a big problem. The torque curve, it looks, from what I'm hearing, that you can play with it. You can move power around where you want it. If you want a bit more bottom-end grunt, if you want more top end. You can kind of play with that a little bit.

One more thing for the engineers to get lost with, right?

Absolutely. One more thing for them to sit at the end of the session and scratch their heads over!

Is there anything unique about Estoril? The fans, culture, travel there?

There's one thing that Portugal has that there's only a few restaurants in the world that have: They call this stuff peri-peri chicken. It's in just about every street corner over there, the restaurants. You can obviously get it at Nando's. We don't have Nando's (in Houston), and that's about my favorite place in the world to eat. But they have it (peri-peri chicken) everywhere over there, every hole-in-the-wall restaurant. I look forward to going there for that reason alone. Obviously, there's the race, the track is OK. It's a bit windy. It could be rainy; it could be sunny. There are a lot of "ifs." You've just got to wake up Sunday morning and see what the weather looks like and go on from there. You just can never predict what the weather is going to be or the wind is going to be there. I've been there before where the wind is so fricken' bad you're like, "Why am I even on a motorcycle?" You're just waiting for a 55-gallon drum to come across the track. So the track is give or take, nothing special. The fans are good there. The fans are cool. For some reason, I seem to have quite a lot of fan base in Portugal, which I don't know where it comes from. It is what it is. Countries are different like that. I think a lot of it stems from Schwantz, Kevin Schwantz in the early days. He was from Texas. He had a big fan base in Germany, he had a big fan base in Assen, he had quite a big fan base in places. I was just the next Texas guy coming on, and they kind of adopted me. It's cool. I have Kevin to thank for a lot of that.


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