Colin Edwards from the weekend he set his first Superbike pole: Elkhart Lake '92. image by dean adams

Continued

Q You will turn 35 soon. How has your training regimen changed as you've aged?

A Pretty much about the same, to be honest with you. I haven't done anything different than I've been doing my whole career. The one thing I got more now than ever is running around after kids. I'm an active guy anyway, and my kids are absolute lunatics, so when you add kid activity, sh*t, their batteries are just, they've got some solar panel action going on. They just never frickin' die as far as battery. So I'm always running around, I'm exhausted just running after kids. [Laughing]

Growing up, you go on a bike ride, or you go wakeboarding, or you go snowboard, "Oh, yeah, that's fun." You get back in bed and you're tired and you go to sleep. Well, sh*t, now you get back in bed and you're just exhausted from frickin' running around in the car, taking them to practice, taking them to do this, taking my boy out to ride bicycles, running around after him, building tracks on the tractor, whatever the hell it is, it's just always doing something.

Q The situation with your teammate, James Toseland. We don't need to drag everyone through it again, but a couple of things surprised me. I guess, honestly, the first thing that surprised me was the way that you reacted. Because I really didn't think that the crewchief that you worked with last year was that good. In my opinion, I was surprised you didn't get Guy Coulon immediately, because I really think he's probably one of the top three crew chiefs in MotoGP.

A I'll tell you how it worked out. Whenever we started from Tech 3, it was already set in stone that Guy was going to be with James. So, okay. I was looking for a crew chief, and Gary was available. I didn't know Gary. I didn't - had really no, let's say, history, of knowing what he did. And then, once we started working together, it started working really good, actually. He's a good guy, seemed to have a - we had a chatter problem a little bit at Malaysia and he solved that immediately. I've always had chatter at Malaysia, so that kind of ranked pretty high up there. I thought, "How did he do that?" I know what he did, and it's something that I've never done before. I thought, "Wow, this guy's actually not bad." We went the beginning of the year and started instilling some confidence in one another. I'm stroking his ego, he's stroking mine, and things were going pretty good.

As soon as things started to turn a little bit sour, with Germany, the crash, which was a Michelin deal, Laguna was a Michelin deal, once all this kind of Michelin thing started happening and the results started suffering, then I started seeing a bit of backlash as far as, I don't know, attitude or whatever it might've been. But I thought, well, you know, everybody was a bit depressed. Everybody was a bit upset at the whole situation that was going on with some tires. So at the end of the day, we went to, not knowing - and there were some things that he came up with, I got Gary in one ear telling me, "Oh, we're doing this, and because we did this, now Valentino's using that." So I'm thinking, I'm only hearing it from one side. So come to find out at the end of the year, Valentino had the sh*t two or three races before, we just copied him. But it was Gary making it sound like it was his idea in the first place, which I should've known was bullsh*t. And then he's feeding James a bunch of bullsh*t as well, and James is eating it all up, and next thing you know, they've decided, kind of co-conspired to, let's say, swap sides.

And he came and told me at Valencia at the last race, Gary. "I want to go work for James." I thought, "Okay." And he started crying and pouting and moping around, "I'm just worried about what you're going to think." My only answer was, "What does it matter? You've already made up your mind. It doesn't matter what I think."

So we spent pretty much that whole weekend not talking to one another. And yeah, immediately, I mean, immediately, as soon as he said he was going to work with James, I went straight to Herve and said, "I want Guy. I want Guy on my side. I know what Guy's capable of."

Guy and James obviously didn't gel, which is unbelievable, because now that I'm working with Guy, he's the easiest guy in the world to work for. You don't have to stroke his ego. You don't have to frickin' pat him on the back. You don't have to butter him up or anything. He just goes and wants to work. That's probably the easiest crew chief I've ever had as far as to get along with. That tells me, James' side, there's some issues with him, anyways, if he can't get along with Guy. So that's it, really, and it's for the better. Our side of the team is just, we're loving life at the moment, having a good time, and most of the good time we have is at their expense. Being two and a half seconds off the pace, we're just thinking, Gary and James, that's supposed to be the magic combination now, they think.

I call James the Wonder Boy. That's just kind of a nickname I gave him, because obviously, I don't know why, but I think it's Wonder Boy as in "I wonder what the hell I'm doing over here?" [Laughing]

A Yeah. You're absolutely right. As far as, we know what we have. We've got two wheels, an engine and a chassis. He's good at, I mean, hell, he's built his own bike. You know that?

Q Yeah. Guy Coulon invented the single-sided swingarm when he was with the ELF endurance team in the 1980s.

A Exactly. Exactly. So he's quite a wizard, when it comes down to it, as far as engineering, but at the same time, he realizes, with me, "Hey, we've got a bike, we've got two wheels, an engine, we're not going to get too far off the baseline. We know what it's capable of right now. Let's just deal with it and fine-tune it." We don't get off on any abstract frickin' crazy direction to see if we can find a tenth. That's not the direction we need to go for a tenth. We need to fine-tune it for a tenth.