STONER UP FRONT AGAIN, CAPIROSSI CLOSE BEHIND
Ducati Marlboro Team men Casey Stoner and Loris
Capirossi made a promising start at gloriously sunny Jerez today,
placing a close fourth and 11th quickest after the first two practice
sessions.
World Championship leader Stoner was just three
tenths down on the fastest man of the day, proving that his
Qatar-winning Desmosedici GP7 adapts well from circuit to circuit.
Capirossi was a slender two tenths further down amongst the tightly
packed leading bunch of MotoGP riders, the top 15 separated by just
0.984 seconds. This afternoon the Italian bettered his morning pace by
more than one second and is confident he can move further forward
tomorrow.
Casey Stoner, 4th fastest, 1m 41.171s
"Things are okay but I suppose we shouldn't really
expect any less than what we've done today. Everybody is saying how
fast the Ducati is and how that's the only reason we were up front at
the last race but here we're still sticking it in there against the
hometown boys, even though there's no big straight, so the Ducati is
proving it's a good package. There's a few things we need to improve -
we need to find a little bit more rear grip and we need to improve the
turning a little bit through the entry and the middle of corners, so
for tomorrow we'll just tweak the suspension and geometry. Otherwise I
think we're already pretty happy with our race set-up. We made the best
tyre selection we could for this race and we're just trying to do the
best job we can with it, same as Qatar."
Loris Capirossi, 11th fastest, 1m 41.409s
"We started this morning with a very similar setting
to what we ran at Qatar and we lost most of the first session because
it wasn't the best choice for this track - we were trying to find more
traction but in the end that meant I didn't have enough feeling from
the front. So we completely changed the set-up for this afternoon,
going back to more standard settings, and things started to go better.
I can now lap easily enough around 41.5 or 41.6 but we need to make
another step forward to be really okay because our target is to lap in
the low 41s. Tomorrow morning I'll do a mini race run to check tyre
endurance but I can honestly say I'm happy with the direction we took
this afternoon and confident that we can improve more for the race."
|
