Casey Stoner and Phillip Island was a match made in heaven. Between 2007-2012 in the premier class, the Australian was undefeated on home turf and speaking on the Gypsy Tales podcast recently, the two-time MotoGP™ World Champion reveals his mind-blowing technique around Turn 3 – one of the most ferocious corners on the World Championship calendar.
Suitably, Phillip Island’s Turn 3 left-hander is now called Stoner Corner. You could never get bored of watching Stoner slide and power is way through there, before getting hard on the anchors for the tight right-hander. But how did Stoner do it? A question we’ve all asked at least once. Well, the man himself reveals all – and it’s a fascinating, must-listen for any motorsport fan.
“My will to win was greater than the fear, so then I had to… if I let fear control me then I would never have gone as fast as I did,” said Stoner. “So I would figure out how to be fast without the same risk and therefore of course, takes a little bit of fear out of it. But it’s also for example going through Turn 3 at Phillip Island or Turn 3 at Valencia, the way I used to go through them, it’s a lot to overcome. The way you crack the throttle on at those speeds.
“Phillip Island is fifth gear right, it’s 265km/h going into the corner, down through the dip and because you’re always getting a big push of wind from the inside going out to the ocean, a lot of the time when you’re pushing in through there the front end wants to go, and I was saying before ‘I don’t like the front end, I don’t like the feeling of it compared to other people.’ I never had confidence. So as soon as you cock that front end, you can’t crash with the front. If you think about it, as soon as you cock the front, dirt track style, you can’t lose the front.
“So basically I would slide before I even got to the corner. And this is where people don’t realise: number one, the difficulty, overcoming the fear. And then why it works. When you go into the corner and you have to get that rear to brake before you get to the corner, otherwise when you get to the corner the front end is dictating everything, and you don’t start to slide until you come out of the corner. That’s not hard, these bikes have a lot of power, it’s really not hard to slide these things.
“But sliding them before you get to the corner… I’ve got to go in, back off just to get the front to load a little bit, and then I would crack the throttle on as soon as I could to get that rear to brake, and basically then just get that little bit of cock on the front tyre, and then basically I couldn’t lose it. So then I could control it, try and almost stand it up and straight line it out of that corner, and then I could straight-line brake going into Honda (Turn 4), which is very hard.
“Normally you drift out, then you’ve got to brake on the left side, bring it back, so you’re braking on the edge and then bringing it back braking on the edge of the tyre. So it’s a heavy braking zone that you’ve got two edges to brake on. For me I would slide through that corner, stay further left and then I could pick it up and brake straight, taking all the risk out of Honda.”
Stoner goes into greater detail about Valencia’s Turn 3 left-hander too, as well as explaining how he got to the point of knowing how to slide his bike the way he did. You can click THIS LINK to watch the full, captivating interview with Gypsy Tales, in which Stoner opens up about undiagnosed anxiety affected him during his MotoGP™ career.