Saturday, 12th April 2008

MotoGP world champion Casey Stoner faces his second tough race in as many starts, after qualifying just ninth for Sunday's Portuguese Grand Prix

Despite a dominant victory at the season-opening Qatar night race, Stoner has struggled with his Ducati at both Jerez - where he qualified seventh and finished eleventh - and now Estoril.

While Jerez was expected to present problems, Stoner had finished a close third at Estoril last September and admits that there are few options left in terms of bike set-up - but insists he's remaining calm.

"We were struggling a little bit for confidence coming here after the problems we had at Jerez and even though I was expecting a better performance at this track we've found similar difficulties. We're really struggling for a set-up and I don't think there's much more we can get out of the bike here," said Casey.

"Even so, we need to look ahead to the warm-up tomorrow to try and find a better solution in a way that will let me fight in the race. Things went so smoothly for us last year that it would be easy to get frustrated with our current situation but they way out of it is to stay calm and have belief in each other," insisted the #1, who held a long debrief with his engineers at the end of the qualifying session and gave a firm handshake to each of his mechanics.

"I know I've got a great team and a great factory behind me, so we'll keep working together until we turn things around. Basically we need to sleep on what's happened over the last two days and head into tomorrow's warm-up in a positive and productive manner."

Handling problems are nothing new to Marco Melandri, who has struggled ever since stepping onto the Desmosedici at the end of last year, but even the Italian had hoped for better than 17th place on the 18-rider grid.



www.crash.net