Casey Stoner’s second place at the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix came after a weekend of exhaustive work from the Australian and his Ducati Team crew, as he took his best result of 2010 in round nine.
The finish was made all the more impressive given the front-end issues Stoner said he had been struggling with during the race. “We tried everything we could this weekend and everything was working more or less as well as it has been all year,” he began.
“At the beginning of the race everything felt pretty good and once I got the tyres up to temperature I wanted to try and make a pass on Dani… as soon as I tried to close in on him a little bit I lost the front and ran it wide. It happened again, and a lap or two later I lost the front too much and basically ran very wide and Jorge was able to get through.”
“For me it just wasn’t worth it, I had to ease off a bit and the rest of the corners seemed okay. I put up the best fight I possibly could, but it wasn’t enough today again. I can always come back in the next race in Brno and see what happens. We are happy with the overall weekend,” he added.
Stoner set a new lap record of 1’21.376 early in the race before he started to experience problems. “I knew we were able to run some pretty quick lap times but when I started to lose the confidence the lap times were gone. It was important to finish the race, I thought there might have been a bit more of a battle but as soon as I saw Dani go down I knew he was obviously having similar issues to me.”
Next up in three weeks is Brno, where Stoner will again go for his first win of the season.
“Brno has normally been very nice to us. We weren’t able to race there last year but I like the track a lot. We can be optimistic and go there with a good attitude, but we need to pull something out to try and get ourselves running up at the front a bit more. This track was probably one of the best chances we have had all season, and unfortunately we just weren’t able to do it, so next race!” he concluded.
Source: http://www.motogp.com/en/news/
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