Qatar MotoGP: Casey Stoner toasts fairytale Honda win

Casey Stoner marked his factory Honda debut with an outstanding debut victory at the Losail International Circuit in Qatar last night.

A 24th MotoGP victory never looked in serious doubt once he ruthlessly disposed of Dani Pedrosa’s threat on lap 12.

He eventually won by 3.440s to claim a fourth win five years in the Doha night race, which is now established as the traditional season opener on the 18-round MotoGP schedule.

The 2007 world champion said: “Everything’s been almost a fairytale with the start to the season. I’m getting more and more confident with the bike and everybody’s working so well together and it was just a matter of continuing that for this weekend.

“It was good that we had the test here before, because we already had the bike pretty much set-up. In the warm-up we found that our bike really didn’t’ want to work too well with a full tank of fuel.

“So we tried a couple of things for the race and even for the race with a full tank it didn’t feel perfect. The bike didn’t give me the traction that I wanted and I couldn’t get the bike to turn quite as easily.

“Once I got past Jorge (Lorenzo) early on, I thought we’d set on a pace that I was quite comfortable at, but Dani was obviously a little bit faster, so he came by. He was able to pull a little bit on me, but we weren’t really in a big hurry because we knew our bike at the end of the race was very competitive.

“So when I saw Dani start to struggle a little bit more with grip and things like this, then I just started to push a little bit more, get closer to him.

“And then once we made an overtake we were able to pull the advantage quickly and from there it was damage limitation and just going around enjoying the race.

“The bike was getting better and better the more laps we did and it was getting easier and easier to ride. So it was really fantastic.

“The worst part of the race for me was probably the first lap. I was expecting some other riders coming up the inside of me because I didn’t feel perfect with the bike in the early laps.

“But after we got into the lead I just wanted to hold a consistent pace. There wasn’t really a bad point of the race that we were worried. If we had to finish second, we had to finish second, it’s good points.

“But we felt we were able to run much faster lap times than what we were doing, so when we wanted to we tried to push a little bit more, the bike started to work better with less fuel. Other than the first lap, the race felt quite calm to me.”

For all the news from the Qatar MotoGP weekend, see Wednesday’s issue of Motorcycle News.