Ahead of the final official pre-season IRTA test at Jerez later this month, several CRT teams will be testing at the Aragon circuit tomorrow and Friday, however there will be a couple of defections.

Sitting out this private test will be Danilo Petrucci from Ioda Racing as the team is building their second bike and Speed Master with Mattia Pasini, who have also cancelled their testing plans as they have yet to receive new updated parts from Aprilia.

Aspar will be present with Randy de Puniet who impressed with his best time in the last test at Jerez - just 0.3 seconds from Pramac’s Hector Barbera - alongside team mate Aleix Espargaro. PBM with James Ellison should finally get his taste of carbon brakes and an Aprilia engine that isn’t in Superstock trim, while Avintia Racing will also be testing after their last two sessions at Sepang, where Ivan Silva and Yonny Hernandez were the slowest riders on track with several teething problems on their Kawaski-FTR machines.

It will be an uphill battle for Michele Pirro as a CRT rider as Gresini Racing’s FTR-Honda has yet to turn a wheel on any track, with chassis delays from FTR. The Italian rider who won the last race of the Moto2 season at Valencia, managed to do some track time at Vallelunga with a Honda CBR 1000RR Superbike equipped with carbon brakes, with Italy’s GPone reporting that he may get a chance to finally ride his complete bike at Imola.

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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.

Source | mcn.com

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