Brno MotoGP: Casey Stoner struggling in seventh

Casey Stoner’s hopes of ending his long MotoGP victory drought hit trouble in Brno today as the Australian was left languishing down in seventh place on the practice leaderboard.

The 24-year-old was a massive 1.317s adrift of quickest rider Jorge Lorenzo with a best time of 1.58.532 leaving him behind factory Ducati team-mate Nicky Hayden and fellow American Colin Edwards.

The 2007 world champion hasn’t won a race since his triumph in Malaysia last October and he couldn’t hide his disappointment today having finished so far off the best pace. 

Stoner, who will move to Repsol Honda for 2011, said: “You can never be happy being that far off the pace but we seem to be losing consistently through each sector, particularly T1 and T2. We still need to improve quite a lot. We more or less know what we want out of the bike but it is just not giving it to us at the moment.

“I’m a little bit disappointed to be so far off the pace. From the first exit the bike didn’t feel great and we couldn’t really improve much more than what we started out with. We got the bike feeling better but not performing better. We got it working easier on the bumps and in the braking points but the lap time didn’t improve much at all. I’m disappointed with progress in that session.”

Explaining the issues that left him struggling 0.8s behind Dani Pedrosa in second position, Stoner said he could not get his factory Ducati GP10 to turn.

He added: “Today I struggled a lot with grip from the middle to the exit of the corner. I just can’t seem to get the bike hooked up. We need to get the bike turning a lot better in the middle of the corners because all of them are very long here.

“I’m have to enter the corner very early because I can’t get the bike to turn the corner. If I want to enter the corner late I end up being three metres wide in the middle. I’m losing too much time in the middle of the turn and then I’ve got no acceleration on the exit.”