Brno MotoGP: Casey Stoner romps to crucial win

Casey Stoner stretched his MotoGP world championship lead to a comfortable 32-point cushion after he dominated yesterday’s Czech Republic round in Brno.

Once he hit the front on lap three after a mistake by Repsol Honda team-mate Dani Pedrosa, Stoner’s sixth win in 11 races never looked in any serious doubt.

And with closest rival Jorge Lorenzo struggling with a botched soft front tyre choice in fourth, Stoner capitalised superbly on the Spaniard’s error of judgement to strike a crucial blow in the title battle and he said: “That points are hugely important. The win was important but we just wanted to be competitive for the rest of the season.

“We’ve struggled these last few races to get our speed up quickly. It has taken a little too long and we need to understand what direction we need the bike to go because when things aren’t so comfortable it takes us a little too long to sort it out. This was a similar weekend to what we had in Laguna.

“I struggled to get that last bit of feeling and that last bit of edge grip from the rear. We were a little bit worried going into the race because we knew we had a set-up that was okay but not really capable enough of running at the front comfortably.

“We went into the race shooting in the dark to be honest and the team did a great job. I was sulking a little bit after the Warm-up because we couldn’t really find anything and we didn’t know why the bike wasn’t really giving us any feedback.

“We tried something for the race and it seemed to be better at the start, which is where we’ve been struggling. Most of the weekend on older tyres we were competitive, but on new tyres for the first half of the race we didn’t seem to have the pace.

“As soon as I got by Andrea at the beginning to catch Dani and Jorge I found it quite easy to do the pace I did and that gave me a lot more confidence. I was able to attack the corners a little bit harder on the exit because I had that little bit extra edge grip.

“I had a fantastic bike for the race. As soon as I got by Jorge, unfortunately Dani crashed and I think without that it would have been a hard race. That gave me the opportunity to pull a small gap and I was able to take a big advantage and from then I stayed consistent.”

Stoner got a front row seat for Pedrosa’s third lap crash and he said: “It just looked like the front dropped really quickly. It just slammed him down like my crash in the wet on Saturday and there was nothing he could do. He was already banked over but it wasn’t slow motion and it went really quickly. It looked like he hit a bump but there are no real bumps there. It was a little bit strange.”

Stoner also denied that Pedrosa’s early exit had seen him change his strategy.
He added: “I would have liked to follow Dani for a couple of laps because I thought we had the pace to pull away from Jorge.

“But in general I was going to run my own race anyway. It would have been interesting to see what pace I could hold compared to Dani but unfortunately he crashed. Maybe it would have been slightly different if he hadn’t crashed.”

For more thoughts from Stoner in seven pages of Brno MotoGP coverage, see this Wednesday’s copy of Motor Cycle News.