Stoner pleased with Valencia start

A rich run of late-season form from Casey Stoner has seen the Australian win his last two races, and in his search for a third consecutive victory he set the fastest time in Free Practice 1 at Valencia.

Recording a best lap which left nearest rival Jorge Lorenzo almost 0.4s behind in second place on the timesheet, Stoner overcame some early problems with the setting on his Desmosedici GP9 to top the timesheet.

Ever the perfectionist, the 2007 World Champion – who won at the Ricardo Tormo circuit last year – targeted improvements before Saturday’s second session and qualifying, but was pleased with the start he had made to the weekend.

“It’s been a very nice run for us; two victories and a second in the last three races has been good. We still have one more race to go, and this is a good way to start the weekend,” said Stoner.

“We were struggling a little bit at the start of the session, we didn’t think about it right before we went out on the track and we had the wrong balance in the bike – it was too high in the front and too low in the rear. But as the session went on we gradually made the bike better and better, and in the last run we put on a harder rear tyre, which helped the bike a lot for us and made it a lot more stable.”

Stoner added, “We were able to do some pretty good lap times and I’d have liked to have gone a bit quicker, but we had a problem with the front tyre and it was basically warping off the side of the rim. Hopefully we can fix this for tomorrow, and we’re pretty happy to have started off like this.”