Texas Tornado Colin Edwards knew he was facing an uphill battle at the weekend's Jerez MotoGP round but mixed weather conditions meant the former World Superbike Champion was chasing a dry setup until the lights went out yesterday.

Edwards had a bizarre crash and then encountered problems with the second bike in qualifying which left him dead last. The forthright American had made some huge changes to combat ever-present chatter and the new softer-construction front Bridgestone also helped but it was enough on race day.

“We didn’t have much dry time this weekend, so dry setup was kind of a guess; we shortened the bike a lot this weekend compared to what when we tested here in March and that got rid of some of the chatter. We put on the new Bridgestone front and it worked pretty good. With a shorter bike and no dry time it took a few laps to get use to it and trying to control the wheelie. We knew it was going to be an uphill battle here after how it went during the winter test," said Edwards.

"It was hard, nothing fun about today. The rear wheel was locking up, with the shorter bike also and no dry time we started getting a lot of underbred, snapping me sideways and that is something we haven’t deal with this year. Thanks to my guys, we tried everything, trying to find a setup. We just didn’t have enough dry time to find it.”