Catalunya MotoGP Reaction: Casey Stoner disappointed with third

Reigning world champion Casey Stoner could not hide his disappointment as third in Catalunya this afternoon saw him lose more ground in the title race.

With Dani Pedrosa romping to an easy win and Bridgestone rival Valentino Rossi taking second for his fourth successive podium, Stoner had to settle for third on his factory Ducati.

Starting from pole position, Stoner had no answer to Pedrosa’s early onslaught and while he was involved in an epic scrap with Rossi from lap nine, he couldn’t match the Italian’s late charge.

Stoner, who hasn’t won since the season’s opening race in Qatar, said: “Looking at the race set-up from yesterday we were confident that we could do some pretty good times today and I felt it was a race we could win but for some reason from the first lap I kept losing the rear on entry into the corners.

“That made me lose confidence because at this circuit there are a lot of places where you need to brake and enter at the same time so I missed a lot of braking markers, made some mistakes and lost too much ground to Dani.

“I managed to work a way around it and in the last part of the race we started to do some reasonable lap times again, but at at that point it was a straight battle with Valentino.

“There was some pretty close passing with him, at times I could almost feel him next to me, but I knew there were some sections where under normal circumstances I could have been faster.

“Unfortunately when you are racing somebody of that quality you need everything to be working well and that wasn’t the case for us today. It hasn’t been a good day and I wasn’t too pleased with the way I rode but at the end of the day you can’t complain too much about a podium.

“Now we’ve got an important test to work out why we had this problem today.”