Pedrosa takes Catalunya

Spanish Honda rider Dani Pedrosa stormed home to a clear win at his home round of the MotoGp circus at Catalunya. In the process he finished off a nice trio - he has now won a GP at the track in all three classes: 125, 250 and MotoGP.

He in fact cleared off relatively early in the race, winning by a handsome margin.

Meanwhile Yamaha's Valentino Rossi made up for an ordinary start from a lowly grid position to fight with Casey Stoner and his Ducati and eventually take second place.

Australian Stoner had a torrid event, battling a lack of traction under brakes and taking much of the race to find a way to get comfortable with the machine. He was puzzled over the cause and expected more from the round.

Meanwhile pit gossip says that countryman Anthony West may lose his seat with Kawasaki at the end of this year and be replaced by an on-form Colin Edwards.

DANI PEDROSA, Honda, 1st
"I'm very happy about this win, my thanks to all the people around me. Today was also very important for the championship, I am now five points closer to the lead, but there are still many races ahead of us, so we need to keep pushing and be consistent. We had a few issues in practice here, so my team was thinking what they could do and they made a small adjustment before the race that improved the bike and helped me to run that pace. Once again, a big thanks to them. I couldn't believe the fans, it seems like every year there are more and more. I'm very happy they were here because I know it was difficult to get into the track today. I was all alone, pushing to go faster and faster and I could see everyone cheering me on. At one point I lost a bit of concentration, but I got my focus back and kept pushing. Now we have two days of tests which will be very important for the next few races."

VALENTINO ROSSI, Yamaha, 2nd
"I think that this was quite a good race! It's a long time since we've had a good fight for the top positions like that and today it was like last year with Stoner, but for second instead of first place! I was able to come out on top this year and I am honestly very happy with today's result. After three almost perfect races, yesterday was a very hard day for us but last night we had a very good meeting and today we were able to be much more competitive. My target was the podium so to come second is excellent. I want to watch the race on TV now because I had a lot of fun today and made some good overtakes, with my M1 and my Bridgestone tyres working very well to the end. Once I passed Stoner I tried to go away from him but it wasn't possible, so then I knew it would be a great battle to the end. Pedrosa was incredibly strong today and I think it's impossible to say whether or not I could have gone with him even if I had started from the front.

As it was we were penalised by our grid position and, with Pedrosa as fast as this, from the third row it was impossible. In these circumstances I am very happy that we only lost five points to him, we're still leading the championship and I had a great race, so I am content! Tomorrow we will have a test and I think it will be quite interesting to see what we can find out about what happened this weekend and how we can improve for Donington. Thanks to all my team and congratulations to Dani."

CASEY STONER, Ducati, 3rd
"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."

Standings