Colin Edwards came close to winning a MotoGP race two decades ago, but didn’t quite manage it… In fact, he was heartbreakingly close… Colin raced in MotoGP from 2003 through to 2014, when he retired halfway through the season. Bertie Simmonds reports…
He raced for Aprilia, Honda and Yamaha. He would take 12 podiums in his 196 races and the closest he came to a victory was 2006 at Assen. With an injured Valentino Rossi further back, Edwards and Nicky Hayden battled for the win, only for Edwards to crash at the final chicane. He’d been racing for decades by this point.
After a promising career in youth motocross, he quit through ‘burn-out’ aged 14. Dad Colin Senior took his son to a road-race event in 1990, and Junior could see some of his old off-road rivals winning – so he wanted to try it. He was a 250cc AMA champ in 1992, beating Kenny Roberts Junior to the title – who would go on to be 2000’s 500cc champ.
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Colin would race in AMA Superbikes on the Vance & Hines Yamaha, taking wins before being given the chance with the factory Yamaha World Superbike squad, then run by Davide Brivio. The YZF750 was long in the tooth by 1995, and his season was cut short when teammate Yasumoto Nagai died in a crash at Assen.
The year 1996 saw him sixth overall and 1997 again was cut short thanks to a wrist injury. Frustratingly, he’d yet to win a race, but this changed for 1998 and a move to the Castrol Honda RC45 V4. He’d take three wins in 1998 and five in 1999 on his way to the runner-up spot in the championship behind Carl Fogarty.
A move to the VTR1000 V-twin in the Castrol Honda camp saw his first world title come his way in 2000 and his second in 2002, following an epic battle between him and Ducati ace Troy Bayliss.
Both would be in MotoGP for 2003. So, despite a ‘coulda-shoulda’ MotoGP career, Colin is remembered as a four-stroke superbike icon, even adding three Suzuka Eight-Hour wins to his two world superbike titles: once with Nori Haga and Yamaha in 1996 and then twice for Honda in 2001 (with Valentino Rossi/Manabu Kamata) and 2002 with Daijiro Kato.
The original feature appeared in Classic Motorcycle Mechanics Magazine.
