Jorge Lorenzo: ‘My grandmother could have been faster’

Jorge Lorenzo will kick off the defence of his MotoGP world title this weekend wondering how he can halt the domination of Honda duo Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa.

It may have only been testing, but Stoner and Pedrosa have been mercilessly fast throughout and the new RC212V is clearly ahead of the Yamaha YZR-M1 and Ducati GP11 going into the 2011 campaign.

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Stoner topped the timesheets again in Qatar tonight with a best lap of 1.55.681 to edge out his Repsol Honda team-mate by just 0.064s.

Lorenzo completed his own pre-season preparations though in frustrating fashion as he ended up down in seventh place tonight.

A best lap of 1.56.707 was slower than his pace last night and he was over a second off Stoner’s pace at the end of the test.

“This wasn’t the best day in my career,“ said Lorenzo, who won nine races in 2010 to score a record-breaking 383-points. “When I ride bad I admit this and say I don’t ride good. My riding is fine but the set-up of the bike is not correct and we wasted a lot of rear tyres.

“My grandmother could have been faster with a better set-up.”

When asked by MCN to explain his problems, he added: “The bike is very heavy to change direction and I don’t feel comfortable in braking and the traction is s**t.”

A new swingarm designed to improve acceleration grip was dismissed as nothing better than the previous version as Lorenzo completed a full race simulation on the soft compound Bridgestone rear tyre.

With the set-up as it was though, the soft tyre wouldn’t go race distance on Sunday night.

He added: “In Sepang we improved but here with the set-up of Sepang the bike is much worse than last year. We have to try last year’s set-up and see if it works.”