Sachsenring MotoGP: Casey Stoner romps to fourth straight pole

Reigning world champion Casey Stoner looks a strong favourite to notch a crucial win in tomorrow’s German GP after he stormed to a fourth consecutive pole position in today’s qualifying session.

The Aussie has been dominant all weekend so far at the Sachsenring and a lap 1.21.067 easily edged out Dani Pedrosa in second place.

The 22-year-old, who has breathed new life into the defence of his world title with crushing back-to-back wins in Donington Park and Assen, dominated free practice as well and the factory Ducati rider said: “Qualifying never used to be a strong point of ours but now we seem to be turning it into one and that is a credit to the team, but also to Bridgestone, who have worked relentlessly on this aspect. We have to be thankful to them for that and to have enjoyed four consecutive pole positions together is fantastic for everybody. It has been a good weekend so far but not perfect because of the crash yesterday, which dented my confidence a little bit. The feeling with the front through that corner was good today though, which means I could get on the attack again today. I was struggling a little bit with the rear spinning up in T4 and I didn’t expect my final lap to be enough for pole but we made up enough time in T3 to pull it off and I’m delighted. We have a decision to make on the race tyre depending on the weather because track temperature today was about 15 degrees less than yesterday so the hard compounds we were using just struggled a little bit today. We couldn’t do quite the same lap times although I wasn’t pushing as hard either, so it would make the decision easier if the sun comes back out tomorrow! We’re trying our best to chase down this championship and we’ll see if it will be possible.”

Stoner goes into tomorrow’s 30-lap race trailing series leader Pedrosa by 29-points and second placed Valentino Rossi by 25-points.