Colin Edwards to ride Suter/BMW in 2012

Colin Edwards has confirmed he will ride a Suter/BMW machine in the new 1000cc MotoGP world championship in 2012.

The Texan will make his debut on the bike, which features a highly-tuned BMW S1000RR engine in a Swiss built Suter frame, immediately after the final round of the season in Valencia next month.

It is not the bike the 37-year-old planned to ride in MotoGP next season having left the Monster Yamaha Tech 3 squad to join the Italian-based Forward Racing project.

When the Texan announced he was moving to Forward Racing during the Misano weekend last month, he told the media he wanted to use a Yamaha R1 engine in a chassis built by his current Tech 3 crew chief Guy Coulon.

That idea collapsed when Tech 3 announced it couldn’t build a frame in time for testing to commence at the end of January.

Edwards was then linked to a Yamaha R1 deal using a Moriwaki chassis but then Yamaha also ruled out supplying his team with engines.

Speaking in Sepang today ahead of this weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix, the double World Superbike champion said: “At the beginning I just said we’d run a Yamaha engine and a Tech 3 chassis because that was my way of putting some pressure on some guys and they obviously didn’t give a shit what I thought because they said no. I got a couple of guys against me on the European side at Yamaha, but at the end of the day it will be BMW/Suter. I’m happy to be working with those guys although it is not going to be easy. We’ll probably be looking for seconds to begin with and then we’ll cut down to half-seconds and then we’ll be looking for tenths. But we probably won’t be competitive at the first race and probably not at the last race, but we will work our ass off to build it.”