Pole holder Stoner happy with weekend’s work so far

Saturday, 7 November 2009

Casey Stoner’s domination of the weekend to date in Valencia, which has secured him pole position for Sunday’s race, has pleased the Australian.

Fastest in both free practice sessions and qualifying, Casey Stoner will start Sunday’s Gran Premio Generali de la Comunitat Valenciana from the front of the grid as he bids to secure a third consecutive race victory in the last event of the 2009 MotoGP season.

The Ducati man has been pleased with the way his Desmosedici GP9 has responded, which was evident in his performance, and is anticipating a tough final race of the campaign.

“I’m really happy, we had a bit of a bad run in Sepang, but this weekend everything’s gone really well and we’ve been quickest in every session,” said Stoner. “We’ve made small improvements to the bike each day. The only problem we’ve got now is the pretty windy conditions, which is making it very difficult to ride and understand where the limit is. I lost the front (of the bike) a few times on the last qualifying tyre, but there’s no way we’re going to be pushing that hard in the race.”

Stoner continued, “I’m feeling pretty good and the bike feels good, we just need to make sure tomorrow morning that everything’s still going smoothly and we’re happy with the setting. It’s going to be a very hard race, there are a lot of people going for this win and trying to get the best result they can. There’s hopefully going to be fireworks tomorrow.”

Having secured his first ever Grand Prix win at Valencia in the 125cc category in 2003, Stoner was victorious last year in the premier class at the Ricardo Tormo Circuit.

“We’ve been strong at almost all the circuits this year,” he said. “Maybe there have been one or two we haven’t been as strong at, but maybe that’s myself as well. Since the beginning of my career I haven’t been strong in some of those circuits. I had my first win here (at Valencia), I’ve always had pretty good results at most circuits to be honest, and we just seem to be getting the set-up right recently.”

A third successive win would be the perfect way to round off the year for the 24 year-old, who missed three races through fatigue earlier in the campaign.

“It’d be a nice end to the season we’ve had so far,” Stoner added. “It’s definitely not gone the way we wanted it to, but I’m very happy with the way things have gone so far in this last period, and we’ll just have to see what tomorrow brings. “