MotoGP news

Stoner misses out by narrowest margin

Ducati rider Casey Stoner will start tomorrow's season-ending Valencia GP from the front row of the grid after missing out on pole position by a tantalising 0.086 seconds. It is his 12th front-row start from the year's 18 races. Team-mate Loris Capirossi will start from the third row. 

"I'm pretty happy again, we're on the front row and we've been concentrating on the race setting," said Stoner. "I've probably got the record for the most second places in qualifying this year; again we missed out on pole by a few thousandths, it's been like that every time we've nearly been on pole this year. The race set-up is looking pretty good and we're quite happy with race distance on the tyres; like this morning we started out with eight laps already on the tyres and finished the session with the same set. But we are still trying to get slightly better lap times towards the end, just to make sure we are competitive at the end of the race. We just need to improve the traction a little bit, because the turning and everything else seems fine. And we've still got to decide what rear tyre to run, depending on what the weather does. It's nice to win the car - Adriana has already scored it!" 

Capirossi commented, "I'm pretty happy because we've set up the bike quite well. We changed the weight distribution slightly to put more weight on the rear for more traction and I could feel the improvement. We have still to decide between two different compound race tyres. Maybe we will try the harder tyre in warm-up to see if it will work well in the race. Anyway, I'm happy, I was lapping consistently around the 1m 33.5s mark and that's not bad. With my qualifying tyres I made a mistake during my first run and I came across a slower rider on the second run. That kind of thing happens, so no problem. The important thing is that we've found a good set-up and I think we can have a good race."

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• 18 Aug.
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• 17 Aug.
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• 16 Aug.
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• 12 Aug.
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• 11 Aug.
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