Sepang MotoGP: Casey Stoner confident of victory challenge

Casey Stoner remained confident he can mount a challenge for a third successive victory in tomorrow’s Malaysian MotoGP race, despite a frustrating qualifying session leaving the Australian on the second row of the grid.

Stoner has roared back to form with victories at the Motorland Aragon and Twin Ring Motegi recently and his bid for a hat-trick in Sepang tomorrow will commence from fifth place on the grid.

The 2007 world champion posted a best time of 2.02.023 to finish 0.486s slower than Jorge Lorenzo and he said: “Today didn’t go to plan but with my race tyre pace I feel pretty confident. I wasn’t able to do a lot of laps today as each time I went out I immediately felt the bike wasn’t working, so I was straight back in to try something different. The bike seems so finicky to get that setting right, you can be miles away in just a few clicks so we’ve got to really work hard and improve that before the end of the season. But for race pace I feel good. I ran the softer tyre this morning and the harder tyre this afternoon and spent most of the last session trying to get the harder tyre working a little better. We felt like we got it working pretty well. I thought when we put the soft tyre in the bike would feel great but we had no grip. I was losing the front every corner and it upset the balance of the bike, so qualifying for us wasn’t such a good event. I was struggling to get the soft tyre to hook up out of right-handers and it was the same with the front on right-handers. Going into every corner I was losing the front.  I should have at least been on the front row or close to it.”