Valencia MotoGP Reaction: Casey Stoner ends dream season with second

Casey Stoner ended his brilliant 2007 campaign with second place in Valencia today as he preserved his 100 per cent record of scoring points in all 18 races.

For once, the factory Ducati rider didn’t have the speed to challenge Dani Pedrosa after he’d threatened another start-to-finish runaway success when he grabbed the holeshot from second on the grid.

But he couldn’t shake off the close attentions of Pedrosa, and on lap six he was powerless to prevent the Spaniard from sweeping by at the first corner.

Chasing his 11th victory, Stoner couldn’t mount a counter attack and he admitted: “I didn’t really have anything left. I got a really good start and led for the first few laps and the lap times seemed to be OK. I kept as consistent pace as I could and pretty much pushed the bike as much as I could. I had a few front loses and things like that and we just couldn’t go much quicker. We were doing low 33’s and obviously Dani (Pedrosa) was just doing a tenth of a lap quicker or something like that and sometimes I’d catch him back and he’d pull again.

“I expected the pace to be sort of low-33s, but didn’t expect it go quite that fast for so long.  It was very close for a long time during most of the race. And then with only a handful of laps to go the left hand side of my rear tyre seemed to give way on me and I had a couple of rear end loses so I just decided to give up at that point. Dani rode a perfect race and he didn’t make any mistakes. And he was definitely running a lot quicker pace than what I expected for the race. So congratulations to him. I’m also very happy for him because I now know what it’s like to win at your home GP now, especially this class and it’s a very good feeling.”