MotoGP news

Better day for Ducati

The Grand Prix of China kicked off today with Casey Stoner back on the pace, the World Champion lapping second fastest in the morning session and quickest in the afternoon to end the day on top of the timesheets. Marco Melandri suffered some technical problems during the morning session but recovered to improve his feeling with the machine in the afternoon.

The setback meant the Italian was unable to complete the entire programme that was planned for him today but he hopes to make continued progress tomorrow. Stoner, meanwhile, is relieved to have recovered his feeling with the front end but says there is still work to do tomorrow.

"It's more comfortable for us here," said Stoner. "The last two races didn't go well in practice but I believe they could have still been two decent results and for a variety of reasons they turned into not so good ones. We couldn't seem to get things right, no matter what we did or what we tried, but this weekend we seem to be back in control again. Front feel is a lot better here, I'm slowly getting my confidence back and I think we can continue to do that over the rest of the weekend. We're getting better and better with rear grip but we're still nowhere near perfect. We struggled last year turning the bike in the fast corners at some tracks and we're still working on it now. We're going to make a couple of big changes to one of the bikes tomorrow and hopefully that can improve the lap time."

Melandri commented, "Unfortunately we lost a lot of time today because of two important setbacks and that stopped me from getting through all the work we had planned. This morning it was a problem with the engine, which wasn't performing to its maximum potential in certain areas of the track, and we only worked out what the problem was at the end. In the afternoon we were working on weight distribution when the bike stopped. It was a silly little thing with the electronics but it broke my rhythm and I didn't have time to test tyres. But even though we only did a few, unproductive laps, we knows what works here and I'm confident that we have the information to improve the bike and the results compared to the last few races."

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