Repsol rider to take off from second on the grid at opening race of the year. Mechanical issues keep teammate Dani Pedrosa down the field in seventh.
Everything is ready for the season-opening race at Qatar, following qualifying at the Losail International Circuit. Sunday, April 8th will see the floodlights on for what is set to be an exciting MotoGP race. Casey Stoner will start from the middle of the front row, having clocked the second fastest time of the session. He was 221 thousandths of a second down on Jorge Lorenzo’s pole lap. Dani Pedrosa experienced mechanical problems and will line up seventh on the grid.
The qualifying session began with Casey Stoner taking the initiative, putting in a 1’55.415 lap on only his third time around the track. On the other side of the Repsol Honda Team box, Dani Pedrosa was having more difficulties than expected and was constantly coming back in for adjustments to be made to his RC213V.
On his final run with new tyres, Stoner flew out into a provisional pole position with a lap 138 thousandths of a second quicker than that of Lorenzo. However, the Spaniard responded to edge Stoner off the top spot. Despite his troubles, Dani Pedrosa had improved upon his time by the end of the session and was looking at a second row start, until Andrea Dovizioso posted a time that dropped him from sixth to seventh.
Dani Pedrosa >> Audio
QP – 1:55.905, 22 laps, 118 km.
“We solved a little the issues we had yesterday with the electronics, but we had other problems today. I stopped in the garage to change the bike and it didn’t start, twice. I lost a lot of time there and I had to take the other bike which I didn’t feel comfortable with either. It’s a shame. The team couldn’t do any better and nor me; from this point I lost the concentration a little and we couldn’t get a better position. Seventh on the grid is not a good place to start the race, but I hope that we don’t have any issues tomorrow and I can have a good race”.
Casey Stoner >> Audio
QP – 1:54.855, 17 laps, 91 km
“I’m not really happy with how qualifying went for us, it should have been a lot better especially on the soft tyre which we hadn’t used all weekend. Last night we were happy with what we had improved and with the set up in general. Then tonight we tried to improve that set up and we just made it worse and worse. In the end we did a full circle and came back to what we had on Thursday night and we have huge chattering problems again.Now we have a lot of work to do to understand what’s gone wrong and where the problem is before tomorrow. If we can make a big step forward in warm up then we can challenge for a podium and maybe fight for the win, but if the bike remains as it is at the moment, then we were going to be in for a long hard race”.
