Catalunya MotoGP: Casey Stoner shocked at pole position

Reigning world champion Casey Stoner admitted he was shocked at scoring his first pole position for nine months with a brilliant qualifying display in Catalunya today.
Stoner bagged his first pole since last September’s Misano GP with a best lap of 1.41.186 that just edged out home favourite Dani Pedrosa by 0.083s
The Aussie said: “This weekend we have been working very well and we’ve improved step by step and we are in a really good position for the race. We are happy with the race times but the first qualifying tyre, which was the same as my last, I wasn’t too happy with it. It was spinning a lot from early in the lap and I was a little bit scared going into my last lap to improve my time. But everything flowed together well and it was a clean lap, nothing special but very clean and tidy. It was a big surprise though coming round and seeing that lap time. The guys have worked really hard and come up with two different set-ups that I’m happy with on two different machines. At the moment we’re torn between which one we’re going to use in the race but that’s a nice problem to have! When we put the final qualifying tyre in I thought we were going to be lucky to be on the front row but I was able to keep it smooth – the lap itself didn’t actually feel all that fast but the time was great and in general we couldn’t have asked for more from the session. Over the past four races we’ve been able to iron some things out, work out why we weren’t as fast as we perhaps could have been at the start of the season and things are getting continually better. This pole position shows that we’re going in the right direction so hopefully that trend can continue through to the race tomorrow.”