Estoril MotoGP: Turning issue slows Casey Stoner

Casey Stoner’s perfect qualifying record for Honda ended in Estoril today as the Australian was left off the front row in fourth position on the grid.

Having been on pole position in Qatar and Jerez, a best lap of 1.37.384 this afternoon saw him finish 0.060s behind Repsol Honda team-mate Dani Pedrosa in third.

Reigning world champion Jorge Lorenzo snatched his first pole position of the season and the Spaniard was 0.223s faster than Stoner, who is looking to bounce back from his controversial DNF in Jerez earlier this month.

The 2007 world champion was taken out by Valentino Rossi while dicing for the podium and he already trails Lorenzo by 25-points in the early title chase with the factory Yamaha rider looking good for a fourth straight win in Portugal tomorrow.

Stoner said: “It’s been a bit of a confusing weekend with the weather and the track conditions. I think yesterday afternoon was the only session where conditions were fine and  we were struggling quite a lot to get a good feeling with the bike and this morning we wanted to improve that.”

“But it was a half wet, half dry track. We didn’t really learn anything. So we decided to stay out on the wet tyres this morning to try and solve a few small issues that we had with the wet set-up in Jerez and we definitely got the bike working a little bit better in these conditions, so we’re pretty happy with that.”

“This afternoon we sort of continued from where we were yesterday afternoon, still the bike wasn’t feeling great. I’m really struggling a little bit on the brakes to get the stability out of the bike. And then to get the bike turning in the middle of the corner was really difficult.”

“Towards the end of the session we decided to change a little bit in the front and go in a different direction and immediately the bike felt better, so we were able to run some quite good lap times for the amount of laps on the tyres.”

“We’re really happy and then basically I had one soft tyre left to try and make a lap time and unfortunately I just made a couple of mistakes during the best laps that I had and we weren’t able to make a good qualifying. But race pace now we’re a lot happier. It wasn’t looking so good at one point yesterday afternoon, but now we’re quite happy where we are.”