Dani Pedrosa definitely deserves a lot of respect, because after undergoing surgery on his shoulder earlier this month, the Spaniard came back this weekend to qualify in third in this afternoon’s qualifying session at Estoril.
Casey Stoner has had a bit of problems on his Honda during practice sessions and the first part of qualifying, but managed to turn the situation around and take fourth, while other Repsol team mate Andrea Dovizioso made a big jump forward from a difficult Friday to take the sixth spot on the grid.
“I’m very satisfied with this front row today.
It was a very close session as it always is in this circuit and our main target this afternoon was to be on the front row, so I’m happy about this,” said Pedrosa.
“For tomorrow, we will try to set up our bike a bit better for the race distance.
I know that physically it will be tough for me because after the recent surgery my shoulder has improved a little but it is still very stiff and the muscles hurt.
Anyway, I hope to be able to stay with Lorenzo because for sure he will be consistant and that will be one of the key points in the race.
The weather is nothing that we can change, so we will need to also be ready to do our best in any condition”.
Casey Stoner said “Today hasn’t really been that great for us either, this morning’s session was pretty much a waste of time we were just working on our wet setting that we weren’t really happy with in Jerez.
We improved that situation a little and we can hopefully expect a better feeling next time in wet conditions.
This afternoon we continued on from yesterday, trying to find a better balance under braking and mid-turn corner speed but it wasn’t until towards the middle, end of session that we started to make some improvements with the bike.
Every time I went out the balance didn’t feel correct so we tried to go in another direction, finally we found the right route and we improved a little bit more each run after that, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to use the qualifying tyre like I wanted to.
When I went out there with the only new tyre that we had for the session, I made a few mistakes in the early laps so didn’t really use the best of the tyre.
I think the race potential is there now and hopefully we can have a good race tomorrow”.
“It was important to start from a good position so I’m happy to start from the second row tomorrow,” declared Andrea Dovizioso.
” We worked on the setting and stability in the front improved so I could push more this afternoon, compared with yesterday.
I rode quite consistently but I wasn’t able to gain some more tenths and lap under 1’38″.
We have two points we would like to work on tomorrow so I hope that the track conditions are fine during the warm up.
Today’s result gives us more confidence for the race after a difficult session yesterday”.