Stoner in with Barcelona front runners
Friday, 06 June 2008
On the first day of MotoGP´s visit to Catalunya, the World Champion Casey Stoner was at the business end of the timesheets.
Casey Stoner made a steady start to the day in the Gran Premi Cinzano de Catalunya Friday morning free practice but in the afternoon he rediscovered his usual speed to put a solid run together in the 1´43s region, before lapping fourth fastest overall - just 0.082s behind quickest rider Dani Pedrosa.
Stoner´s Ducati Marlboro colleague Marco Melandri also started out with some problems this morning but unfortunately he went backwards in his search for improvements in the afternoon, when he was unable to improve his time.
Casey Stoner - fourth
`There´s definitely not a lot of grip out there, I´m not really sure why. I don´t know what kind of races they´ve been holding here but it´s very slippery and it hasn´t been caused by the rain. It´s something else and it isn´t consistent, it´s just in random patches all over the track. It makes it difficult to set up the bike but it´s also dangerous because it can catch you out, as it seems to have done to more than one rider. As far as set-up is concerned we came here with a very similar bike to Mugello. We´ve changed the overall geometry a little this morning to put more weight on the rear for these long turns, where you lose a lot of traction in the middle, but the bike still wasn´t working that well so in the afternoon we changed the tyre to a different construction and everything came a lot easier. Tomorrow we need to work on getting a little more feeling from the front.
Marco Melandri - sixteenth
`The track is really slippery and we´re having the same problems as usual - we can´t find any grip on the rear and the bike is moving around a lot. In the afternoon the temperature increased compared to the morning and that made things worse because it was even harder to get a good feeling. I can´t get into the corner and pick an effective line so that is obviously slowing me down a lot. We still have a lot of work to do.´
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