Stoner Talks

INDIANAPOLIS, IN, AUG 27 - Ducati Marlboro's Casey Stoner was fastest in opening practice for the Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix, but said the most important thing is to keep progressing.

Stoner has been quick out of the box much of the season, but the progress comes to something of a halt and he hasn't been able to translate the early speed into race wins. Stoner is currently enduring the worst drought of his MotoGP career since joining Ducati and would like to put an end to it. To do that, he'll have to find more speed and keep pace with Fiat Yamaha's Jorge Lorenzo, the second fastest rider who had the most consistent pace.

"Yeah, I mean I guess today went alright," Stoner said. "You know, everything's been going OK all season. We started out testing quite well, we started out weekends well in the past, but unfortunately just not transferred it into a great result. So hopefully this weekend can be different, but we just need to keep working and see what everybody else can come out of the bag with, because the first day at a circuit like this everyone sort of takes their time to really get going, so we'll have to see what everybody's capable of tomorrow."

Forks were today's biggest change. Stoner was using the 2011 Ohlins, with 42 mms tubes, as compared to the 2010 models that are 48 mms wide. Though the tube size is different, they're designed to have a similar feel while providing more feeling."

"New forks, like I've said, the whole time, is that they're very similar to the forks that we started out the beginning of the year," he said. "There's a few minor differences that maybe give us a little bit more feedback than what they did before and hopefully that can give us the difference, because the forks we've been running since the beginning of the year have been fantastic, but on the particularly bumpy circuits it makes things a lot more difficult and we're just trying to sort of solve those issues and hopefully these new forks can be the difference. But we're just willing to take a risk at the moment, we're willing to see what we can do and hopefully it works out in our favor."

The tracks that Stoner has most struggled on are the bumpy ones and Stoner feels Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the bumpiest so far. He believes that 70% of the track needs to be resurfaced.

"All the bumpy circuits we've been struggling a lot more than everyone," he said. He added that "in general the feeling was quite a bit better and we're just going to have to wait and see. Obviously I have no idea. We did one session and nobody's really up to speed yet, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens."

He'd earlier discussed trying a radically different set-up to find grip, but not today.

"Like I said, the forks are the biggest risks we're taking this weekend at the moment," he said. "We really need to find a heck of a lot more speed or a better feeling and yeah, we might try something completely. In some of these next races, yeah we'll try something. We were scheduled to try something really unique in the Brno test, but unfortunately when we came back it started raining. So we've got a couple of things to try, but we're not holding out for them to give us the extra speed and the extra confidence."