Strong start leaves Stoner in confident mood

Casey Stoner was immediately on the pace at the Gran Premi Aperol de Catalunya as FP1 marked the start of the seventh round on Friday, and the Australian was extremely encouraged by how his Desmosedici GP10 felt as he set the second-fastest time.

The Ducati Team rider’s best lap of 1’43.412 was 0.153s off that of Jorge Lorenzo’s and the manner in which his factory machine handled the hot track surface and the progress made throughout the 60 minutes was a big positive for Stoner.

“So far everything feels quite good on the track. The grip is good and there are not too many bumps so I’m quite impressed with that,” started Stoner’s assessment of the session. “The bike was slowly starting to feel better the more laps we did and each step we made seemed to make a small improvement.”

“Now I’m looking forward to getting out there tomorrow and seeing if we can make a few more improvements, and then maybe we can be competitive for the race,” he continued. “For the last two races we have definitely been fast enough but unfortunately had a bad start in one race and in the other there was too much arm pump. So I need no more excuses, I need to find the best set-up we can for the race and see what we can do.”

Stoner has been treating his case of arm pump throughout the week as he aims to push on from his first podium of the season at Assen last Saturday, but he is fully focused on making up the gap to Lorenzo in the second practice on Saturday morning.

“We still need to gain a couple of tenths on Jorge but the time we already have there we just need to have a few more laps to build up the speed,” he said. “So it’s not something we’re worried about, but yes we feel a lot more confident this weekend, similar to last weekend and race day in Silverstone.”