Dani Pedrosa ready for back-to-back 'challenge'

Dani Pedrosa will try to claim his first ever back-to-back MotoGP race wins from pole position in Sunday's San Marino Grand Prix at Misano.

Winner of his third race of the season last Sunday at Indianapolis, Pedrosa took his fourth pole of the 2010 campaign by 0.308sec from world championship leader Jorge Lorenzo.

Repsol Honda rider Pedrosa starts round twelve 68 points from Fiat Yamaha rider Lorenzo, who will line-up alongside him on the grid.

“I'm happy to be on pole position because we were strong throughout practice and things have gone according to plan so far this weekend," said Pedrosa, who has been 1-2-1 in the three track sessions so far at Misano.

"We are doing a very good job at the moment, improving at every round and now we have the chance to have another good race. I've never won two MotoGP races in a row and this is a good challenge for me - I really want to go for it.

"Today went well especially because this was a very tight qualifying session and, as I said yesterday, it was crucial to be on the first row of the grid to have the best chance of getting through the first corners cleanly, because they are very tight.

"It's a quite a tricky circuit and tomorrow it will be important not to make any mistakes - particularly on the brakes - in order to keep a high pace for the whole race distance. I think it will be very difficult to make a gap, but we'll wait and see what the strategy is for the race.

"Hopefully we can get through the first corners cleanly, and then we will simply need to push very hard to win. We have a good opportunity.”

On the other side of the factory Honda garage, team-mate Andrea Dovizioso had a less fruitful qualifying session and will start his second home grand prix of the season from eighth place.

“We made a big change to the set-up of the bike in terms of weight distribution to get a better feeling with the front end, but it didn't work for us," said Dovi. "I was struggling a lot with the front and at the end of the session I almost crashed - like in Brno. It is very difficult to improve your lap time when you don't have the confidence with the front.

"Now we have to decide whether to keep going in this set-up direction with something more radical or go back to what we had before. I'm disappointed to have qualified this far back for my home race, so we have some work to do tonight to find a setting that can improve things for warm-up and in the race. We've made it quite tough for ourselves, but we'll aim to get a good start and make up as many positions as possible early on.” 

Source: http://www.crash.net/motogp/news/