Le Mans MotoGP: Casey Stoner confident of victory challenge

Casey Stoner is confident he can mount a challenge for victory in tomorrow’s French MotoGP race even though he missed the front row of the grid for the first time in 2010 this afternoon.

A late attack by Repsol Honda rider Dani Pedrosa bumped Stoner off the front row with the 24-year-old’s best time of 1.33.824 leaving him fourth place on the grid for the 28-lap race.

Stoner was 0.251s adrift of Spaniard Pedrosa and nearly half-a-second outside of Valentino Rossi’s benchmark.   

But while the 2007 world champion believes he can still mount a strong victory challenge on board the factory Ducati GP10, he has admitted that he must improve his performance on Bridgestone’s soft tyre.

He said: “I’m pretty happy with everything but we need to improve our qualifying set-up because we can’t seem to get the soft tyres working good enough. When we get them to work the bike starts bouncing and skipping everywhere and we end up with the bike not getting out of the corners as it should. 

“We need to try something different at the next race but it’s not a big worry. You can be on pole like Qatar and be sixth into turn one. Maybe starting fourth here means I’ll be up front at turn one. But I feel very comfortable with the bike on race set-up and it’s the easiest it has ever gone around this circuit so I’m looking forward to the race.”

Stoner also conceded that it was imperative he has a strong performance tomorrow to help him claw back some of the big points deficit he has on Yamaha duo Jorge Lorenzo and Rossi.

Stoner already trails series leader Lorenzo, who qualified second on the grid, by a massive 34-points after just two races.

He said: “I need to start winning races to pull back points because it is going to be a little difficult. Our package is very good under brakes so hopefully that will make me difficult to pass and in general I’m happy.

“The bike is also good on corner exits. One problem is losing some time in T3, so we’ll look at that in the morning.”

Does that mean he would adopt a more aggressive strategy in the race?

“I don’t believe so. Every race has to be calculated and I had a big miscalculation at the first race and I have a lot of ground to make up. But we have a lot of races to do that and I’m not worried. I just need to concentrate race by race, “added Stoner, who has won 20 races for Ducati.