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NEWS
Stoner's big plans to soften up
The Australian is sitting pretty in the MotoGP at Phillip Island, as he knows he's still got a bit up his sleeve in today's qualifyingCasey Stoner deliberately short-changed himself on tyre selection in MotoGP practice at Phillip Island yesterday, but he knows it could be his trump card in today's qualifying ahead of tomorrow's 2012 AirAsia Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix at Phillip Island.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect but I was pretty happy with the way the first session went and we actually got a fair lap time out of the hard tyres this afternoon,” said Stoner.
“Everyone else chose a soft tyre, but we decided to start working early on the hards and we still managed to improve our lap times, so we were pretty happy.
Casey was surprised by the gap he was able to pull on the other competitors.
“I saw the others going out there on new softs and I was expecting them to close the gap or get in front of me, as there is a huge difference between a new tyre and an old one,” continued the five-time Phillip Island MotoGP winner.
“But I was still considerably faster than them with more or less a race distance on the soft tyre. If we’d put on a new soft, we could have gone a big step faster, but it was very positive for us to improve on the harder tyre.”
In the opening session today, Stoner signalled his intentions very early with a sensational time of 1:30.374, which left his competitors, including title combatants Jorge Lorenzo (Yamaha Factory Racing) and Dani Pedrosa (Repsol Honda) with a lot of work ahead of them.
In the second session, Stoner topped the timesheets again with team-mate Pedrosa grabbing the second fastest time, with fellow Lorenzo was third. However, Stoner was the only rider to drop below the magical 1:30 mark.
When asked about the state of his injured ankle, Stoner said: “Yeah we still have an issue but nowhere near as bad and we are able to ride the bike reasonably normal.
“The circuit has deteriorated over the past year and I’m sure it’s causing issues for everybody, but generally we’ve found a pretty good pace here and it’s nice to ride around here on the 1000cc bike again with that extra bit of horsepower; it’s a lot of fun.
“And it’s great to see everybody coming down to enjoy this weekend. If we can get some better weather it will be even better for everybody. It’s nice to know my last race here has got huge support and hopefully we can deliver for everybody.”
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