Donington Park MotoGP: Casey Stoner more comforted by dry performance after dominant wet qualifying

Despite having a whopping six tenths advantage over the rest of the field in today’s wet qualifying session at Donington Park, the reigning MotoGP champion has said he’s happier with the dry performance than the wet.

Stoner was half a second faster than everyone in the dry in both free practice session yesterday, and although the changes made to the bike at the Catalunya test have vastly improved the Ducati in the wet, he’s more impressed with the dry setup.

He said: “We’ve always had a good setting with this bike for the wet conditions but we managed to find a little bit extra today and I was able to get into a fast and consistent rhythm with a good feeling.

“Obviously I’m happy to have set this pace in the wet and to be on pole position by such a margin but the most pleasing aspect for us so far this weekend has been the bike’s performance in the dry yesterday.

“The work we did at Barcelona has made it a lot easier to ride, it’s a lot smoother and that gave me confidence to push it in wet conditions, which is important.

“You can never trust the weather forecast here so we’ll just sleep on it and see what we get in the morning.

“Whatever it is I’m confident.”

When quizzed on what the changes to the engine management have been, Stoner’s reply was: “It just smoothes the power in the bottom part of the engine.

“When everything is trying to go through the torque of the engine it as causing the bike to be a little too much like a two-stroke and very easy to start pumping.

“Basically it’s just calmed everything down.

“It’s not new software – it’s something we’ve always had but not had a chance to test yet and we decided to test in Barcelona and it went very well so it’s something I’ll use from now on.

“It makes the bike a little more sweet off the bottom.”