Le Mans MotoGP: Casey Stoner shocked at Yamaha slump

Casey Stoner admitted he was shocked to see Yamaha struggle so much on the opening day of practice for the French MotoGP race in Le Mans.

The Aussie led a Honda domination of today’s sessions with HRC claiming the top four fastest times in this morning’s first practice.

Stoner had beaten Repsol Honda team-mate Dani Pedrosa into second place by 0.298s after he clocked a best time of 1.34.133.

The 2007 world champion’s domination of the first day at the historic Bugatti track continued this afternoon when a lap of 1.33.782 put him 0.404s ahead of San Carlo Gresini Honda rider Marco Simoncelli.

Best Yamaha this morning was reigning world champion Jorge Lorenzo, who was fifth quickest but over a second slower than Stoner.

Lorenzo was once again top YZR-M1 challenger this afternoon, the Spaniard again finishing fifth with a time of 1.34.659. That was just less than 0.9s away from Stoner’s speed.

The sweet handling characteristics needed for the heavy braking and hard acceleration characteristics of the Le Mans circuit have previously favoured the YZR-M1.

And Yamaha hasn’t been defeated at the French venue since Chris Vermeulen won a rain-lashed race in 2007 for Suzuki.

Stoner, who won the season’s opening race in Qatar on his factory RC212V debut, said he was surprised to see Yamaha struggle so much.

“I’ve just been looking at this and it is strange because they have always been so strong at this track with the braking point and able to keep the corner speed. They didn’t seem to have any big disadvantage on this circuit and they’ve always been strong here.”

“So it’s strange that now the Honda’s are in front. I don’t know what the problem is at the moment but maybe tomorrow they will improve. It’s a very strange situation. In the first practice, Jorge was so far back and normally Colin (Edwards) is fast here, so it is definitely interesting but I don’t know why they are struggling,” said the former Ducati rider.

Stoner was also happy with the performance of the new 2011 Ohlins front forks he evaluated today. He’d discarded the new suspension during winter testing in Sepang but experimented again during the recent Estoril test in Portugal.

Both his bikes were fitted with the 2011 forks today and he added: “I don’t think there’s a huge improvement but there is a slight improvement. We have made it better on the bumps and a little better on the brakes.”

“They have taken away some of the trouble we had at Portugal and hopefully they will work at other tracks.  We had some difficulties when we first tested them in Sepang but hopefully with slightly different settings now we can continue. But if problems arise we maybe will go back to the other forks in some tracks.”