Casey Stoner annoyed with crash

A final day crash didn’t dampen Casey Stoner’s spirits after he completed another impressive testing display for Honda’s official factory squad in Malaysia yesterday.

The 2007 world champion, who topped the timesheets on the opening day, ended with the third quickest time overall behind Marco Simoncelli and Repsol team-mate Dani Pedrosa.

The Aussie clocked a best time of 2.00.811 to finish just 0.054s off Simoncelli’s best pace as the San Carlo Gresini Honda caused the first big upset of the 2011 MotoGP campaign.

Stoner was still satisfied with his performance despite the final day crash at turn 12 caused when he clipped a white line as he powered out of the previous turn on a hot lap.

The former factory Ducati rider said: “Today (Thursday) was the best day considering I had a crash. It was big crash with a small mistake. I hit the white line and lost the front and I was bit annoyed at that. But we made some nice steps forward. We tried mainly back-to-back with the softer and harder chassis trying to get a good feeling for them. We still didn’t change any set-up, which is really positive. I just tried a few different things with engine braking and we got the bike to work a lot better with used tyres.”

Part of his work on worn tyres concentrated on a revised traction control setting and he added: “We used a different traction control system, which when it really started to spin it caught you a little bit earlier.  When you’ve done 25 to 28 laps on the tyres they really start to spin and this electronic system was able to catch you a little bit quicker when it started to spin too much, it worked quite well, very progressive and helped me keep corner speed.”