MotoGP news
Pedrosa makes do with podium
21 October 2007Dani Pedrosa guided his Repsol Honda RC212V to third place in a tightly-fought Malaysian Grand Prix held in sweltering conditions at Sepang on Sunday. Starting from his third pole position in as many races Pedrosa was second into the first corner behind Casey Stoner and immediately began to apply relentless pressure to the Australian. Lap after lap Pedrosa was quicker on the approach to the final hairpin corner, often coming alongside Stoner but never quite being able to pull off the pass.
"I pushed very hard at the beginning because from what we'd seen in practice I was expecting the grip level from the tyres to fall away towards the end of the race," said Pedrosa. "My plan was to make a gap if possible and handle the grip situation as well as I could. For the first few laps I was quite consistent behind Casey but when I started to brake later with a full tank of fuel I was losing the front end, so I dropped back a little and that's when Marco passed me. At that stage I was trying to maintain my rhythm and, as the race went on and the fuel load came down, I began to get a better feeling at the front of the machine under braking. I was really surprised about the high pace in the final part of the race because we didn't expect to maintain these lap times based on what we'd seen in practice. So I must say thank you to Michelin because we were able to get on the podium today thanks to the consistency of the tyre performance. Now I'm looking forward to Valencia because it's a home race and I'd like to get good result for the fans. I hope we can take another step forward and get even closer to taking the win."
Nicky Hayden commented, "The team did a really good job this weekend and the bike was working very well in the race. Unfortunately I didn't get a great start and on the first lap or two I got boxed in everywhere and I always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That cost me a lot of positions but once things settled down I started moving forward and was going well. Then, passing Elias at the end of the back straight, I got in too hot and it was a silly mistake which I'm not happy about. I was in the draft and just got into the corner a little too fast. After that I got back on the track, put my head down and I'm actually proud of the way we recovered and started setting some really quick laps. First I caught Colin and lost a little time getting by him. Then I was able to catch Hopkins and Vermeulen on the last lap but we ran out of time to pass them. Still, I think I had the fastest lap of the race for a while which is encouraging considering how things were going earlier this weekend. Our speed and rhythm was way better than 9th place today and that's encouraging, but it was rider error that cost us a better result today. We've got one more chance to get the job done in Valencia in two weeks."
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