Pedrosa expects hard race on Sunday

Repsol Honda’s Dani Pedrosa recovered well from a high-speed accident in qualifying at the Iveco Australian Grand Prix to take third place on the grid for Sunday’s race, on his second RC212V.

Describing how things had gone, after he qualified around seven tenths of a second down on poleman Casey Stoner and World Champion Valentino Rossi, and beat his compatriot Jorge Lorenzo to the final front row slot by just 0.001s, Pedrosa stated, “It was very close. I crashed in the middle of the session and I lost my rhythm as I had to go back out on my second bike.”

“It is good to be on the front row but the first two (Rossi and Stoner) are a little bit faster, so we will have to work hard for the race. It will be very important to be constant as the race will be long and we just need to improve.”

As to whether he could expect to fight for victory, he remarked, “We will see what the conditions are like and see how everything looks. If we can improve our pace then we will be trying to be as fast as we can, but we know it is going to be tough tomorrow. Casey will try to pull away and Valentino will try to follow him right from the start, so it is going to be hard.”

Meanwhile, trying to assess what had happened when he crashed, Pedrosa also stated, “It was at high speed on the way into Turn Two so it’s a relief that I wasn’t injured and I was able go straight back out on track for the second half of the session. I’m not sure yet why I fell - I just touched the brake and boom - I was down. We’ll take a look at the data and try to find out exactly what happened.”