SEPANG, MALAYSIA, OCT 18: Ducati Marlboro’s Casey Stoner was denied pole position for Sunday’s Malaysian Grand Prix by the slightest of margins.
Time lost during two tire changes cost Stoner a minute of track time and prevented him from using more than two rear qualifying tires. His final qualifying effort was cut short when the checkered flag fell about 20 seconds before he could complete his out lap.
The result was that he qualified seventh, his worst since qualifying ninth in the third race of the year in Portugal.
“It’s a team mistake, we are sorry for this,” team coordinator Livio Suppo said.
Stoner said that with that “with that extra minute we would have got that lap in and it would have been perfect, but we made a mistake in the tire change and this, you know, didn’t enable us to get in that last lap.”
Asked if he would have been on pole, he replied with a confident, “Yeah, no problem,” adding, “We’re normally pretty good on qualifiers now. I mean, I had one qualifying tire, I did that lap time, I don’t think it would’ve been a problem at all to reach the next bit.”
The third row isn’t as damaging at Sepang as some other tracks, given the opportunities to pass.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of room, but also I know this track, everybody sort of, you know, likes to move around a little bit, so when it’s a tighter track everybody stays more straight,” he said. “But when there’s a lot of room everybody likes to do this (weave) going through.”
Stoner said his race pace was encouraging. Problems suffered on Friday were mostly solved during Saturday’s all-dry morning practice.
“The situation for the race is very good at the moment,” he said. “We were struggling a little bit yesterday. We couldn’t quite get the lap times, but this morning we improved it a lot. We slowed the pumping up and the bike’s reacting a lot better to what I want it to do. And I think for the race we are quite confident, but we have to make sure that we get a good start tomorrow and we’ll see what happens.” .
