MotoGP news
Pedrosa celebrates home pole
03 November 2007Repsol Honda's Dani Pedrosa delighted his home fans at the Ricardo Tormo circuit today by claiming pole position for Sunday's Grand Prix of Valencia in a thrilling qualifying battle. In yet another blistering display of one-lap pace the 22-year-old Spaniard took his fourth pole in successive races to give him the ideal starting position for tomorrow's 30-lap race. Nicky Hayden joins Pedrosa on the front row after an equally impressive showing on his Michelin qualifying rubber.
"Well, I'm very happy to be on pole position again - and especially here in front of my home fans because I really want to give them a good result," said Pedrosa. "There are already many people here looking for Spanish success and tomorrow I'm sure there will be even more. We must try to improve our machine settings further and find that little bit extra for the race because the lap times are still very close and we cannot relax at all. Thirty laps makes it a long race and tyre choice will be critical of course to give us the best chance of maintaining our pace right until the end. The practice was positive this afternoon and I was able to go fast on race tyres as well. The Michelin qualifiers also worked very well again and I was able to improve on my second lap by quite a lot - which was just enough for pole position. The weekend has gone well so far and I hope I can make a good start and challenge for the win tomorrow."
Hayden added, "When I put the qualifiers on, the bike was really good and fun to ride - that was by far the most fun I've had this weekend and I dropped my lap time by two and a half seconds. But it's honestly been a bit of a nightmare this weekend up to now. For whatever reason I cannot get the race tyres to work for me here. I've had a lot of luck with the 16-inch rear tyre at the last few races but at Valencia it's been really tough. Still, I've got some good guys around me and an excellent team so we'll definitely be trying something huge to improve things for tomorrow. Being on the front row is a big advantage here, though I know these guys are going to make it tough. Race day is always a different story and anything can happen so we'll just try to stick our nose in there, put a bid in and try to finish off the year really well. I'm excited about the race - I wish I was quicker on race tyres but we'll see what happens when the light goes out. Whatever happens, I'd like to dedicate this performance to Merlyn Plumlee, my mechanic from AMA superbike who died from cancer last week."
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