planetearth
There Can Be Only One
Number of posts : 3271
Registration date : 2007-02-03
 |  Subject: Stoner: We can win again tomorrow.  Sat Mar 24, 2007 11:39 pm | |
| - Quote :
- Casey Stoner continued to indicate that his Qatar victory won't be a one-off by qualifying an ultra-close fifth for Sunday's second round of the 2007 MotoGP World Championship, at Jerez in Spain.
"Qatar worked out perfectly and this weekend could do the same," declared the Australian, "but we've got to be realistic because there's going to be a lot more riders up front in this race. As you saw last year the first turn can be a bit rough here, I think I went from 15th to fifth, you never know what can happen at this track."
The Ducati Marlboro rider is looking in good shape after leading the first 40-minutes of this afternoon's qualifying hour, on race tyres, then twice returning to pole on his two runs with qualifying tyres, before slipping to the middle of the second row - but just 0.122secs behind fastest man Dani Pedrosa.
"We hadn't been able to find a good feeling with the second bike, so we swapped the forks out of the first bike and that seemed to solve the problem," revealed Stoner. "Straight away I felt comfortable, we made a couple more changes during the session and our race pace is looking very good. I'm not sure if the problem was in my head or in the forks! I don't know which bike we'll race, both have performed pretty well. We found out what race tyre we wanted in the last session and if it's around this temperature tomorrow we're going to be pretty happy..."
Just 0.325 seconds covered the top ten riders during qualifying, making it the closest top ten in premier-class history, but one rider unexpectedly left outside of that group was Stoner's team-mate Loris Capirossi who will line up for his 250th grand prix - exactly 17 years after his first - from a lowly 15th on the grid. Crash | |
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