Stoner: “It will be very tight”

Casey Stoner will be aiming to turn his sixth front-row start of the season into a first victory of 2010 at the eni Motorrad Grand Prix Deutschland on Sunday, after qualifying second in a closely matched session at Sachsenring.

The Australian was happy with the overall performance of his factory Desmosedici GP10 on Saturday, and was only 0.024s off pole holder Jorge Lorenzo’s time of 1’21.817 as he lapped consistently in the 1’22” region.

“Everything seemed to go pretty well, we were just slowly working on the set-up and trying to get the harder tyre to work, because if the conditions are hot tomorrow we’re going to need them. In general our bike seems to be working pretty well,” said Stoner.

“We would have liked to have been on pole position, I think I would have been fast enough but unfortunately I got held up and wasn’t able to do the job. So we’ll just have to see tomorrow.”

At just over a tenth faster than Dani Pedrosa who was third and also consistent with his pace, Stoner believes the closeness will be replicated in the race.

“Looking at the lap times, myself, Jorge and Dani are all running very consistently and very similar lap times,” he explained. “We don’t really know what to expect, we will have to do our job and our best, but looking at the lap times things are going to be very tight.”