Forward Racing couldn’t have picked a more popular rider and mouthpiece than Colin Edwards to announce that the team will be fielding a Suter–BMW machine next season.
The veteran MotoGP rider confirmed he would be riding for the Claiming Rule Team (CRT) early last September and hinted that the team could be using a Yamaha R1 engine inside of one of Guy Coulon’s Tech3 chassis, however this was shot down by Yamaha, so the team turned to the only CRT based bike that has been extensively developed so far, the Suter–BMW.
The Suter–BMW uses a SBK spec S1000RR engine inside a Suter chassis and the bike ridden by Moto2 rider Mika Kallio at the Brno test in August was 3.
9 seconds slower than Casey Stoner on the RC213V, but this was already a definite improvement from when the Finn tested the machine at Mugello in July when it was over six seconds slower, always compared to Stoner.
Edwards will have have a vast amount of work to do in 2012 as he tries to make this machine competitive over the season.