As long as he stays away from milk, cheese, and other dairy products, Casey Stoner likes his chances for this year’s MotoGP World Championship.The 2007 MotoGP title-winner said his doctors had isolated his mid-season illness as lactose-intolerance and that since adjusting his diet, he’s become increasingly stronger as he sails through his first injury-free off-season in years. For the first time since he joined the MotoGP class, the Australian can work at full strength over the winter in preparation for what he believes will be a successful 2010 campaign.Stoner said that for the last three years “we had a really good start to last season and we thought things were going to go a little bit more our way,” at the start of a wide-ranging press conference at Wrooom 2010, the combined Ducati Marlboro/Ferrari Marlboro press intro in the Italian Dolomites. “We thought we’d at least take the fight for the championship to the end and when we finally hit the right set-up with the bike I started having a problem with myself.”At first we thought it was just a slight illness-that I had a cold or something-and it was affecting me quite a lot. And as the next races went on, we realized it wasn’t going away, and it was just continuing to get worse. I just wasn’t able to do anything on the bike; after three-four laps I was completely destroyed. We went and had as many appointments with as many doctors as we could, and nobody really had any answers. Everybody started immediately pointing to my head, that it was a mental problem, psychologically, and all these kinds of things. I knew better; I’ve been doing this sport long enough that I’m not just going to have a mental breakdown in the middle of the season when everything’s going well.”By the British Grand Prix at Donington Park, “things were becoming a little dangerous in my riding. I was becoming too tired to control the bike well and decided just to have time off and figure it out.”Stoner saw seven or eight doctors on three different continents throughout his ordeal. The breakthrough came when one suggested lactose intolerance, “which ended up being our Achilles heal, which ended up being our fault. We figured that out over the two-month break that we had and came back strong again in racing. It was basically like racing for the first time again; being so uncompetitive for so long and then being able to run at the front in a race again and last until the end was just an unreal feeling. So a big thanks to everybody who supported me, but we definitely had a lot of critics over that time, so it was nice to come back and end up with a few good results before the end of the season and end things on a strong note, ready for next year. Now we won’t be able to run into that problem anymore.”As for 2010, Stoner said he was “definitely looking forward to this year. It’s the first off-season that I’ve had in the last three years where I haven’t had an injury or some sort of operation, so it’s been very nice to have the off-season free and be able to train throughout.”The last test in Valencia, we tried the new bike-the new engine configuration-and I really loved it. We had a lot more traction, we were able to do a lot more with the bike, and considering Valencia is a very good circuit for our bike anyway, we were still able to do a very good job with the new engine configuration, so I was very happy with that, and we believe it’s going to help us on the tracks-at the circuits that we struggled with a little bit more in the past, make the bike a little more balanced throughout the season. At the moment, we’re very happy, and confident we can take the fight a little bit further in the season.”To do that he’ll have to beat three other riders, Valentino Rossi, Jorge Lorenzo, and Dani Pedrosa, the other three riders who, along with Stoner, have dominated the past few season. Rossi stands out as the one to beat “because he’s won the championship for the last two years in a row now. Both rivals,” Rossi and Lorenzo, have their strong points because sometimes Valentino can be very fast and strong during a weekend but in a race struggle a little bit. But other times you think he’s struggling and he’ll put it out for the race and do very well. Jorge sometimes is a little easier to understand. If things aren’t going well for him, then he normally doesn’t improve for the race. But normally he’s very strong throughout the weekend and that continues for the race. They both have different strong points and different ways of approaching the weekend.”Asked by a Formula One journalist what he thought about the longevity Rossi and the return of Michael Schumacher, the Formula One legend who’s returning to the track after a three year absence, he said, “the more people to fill the gaps at the front then the better it is. It’s something I think MotoGP and F1 is struggling a little bit with the numbers, and that’s why the gaps are so big: there’s nobody filling the gaps. Valentino has been there for a long time now. He once was the young gun and now he’s the old hen, but we’ll have to try and take him down next year. As for Michael, he hasn’t been there for a few years now, and it’ll be interesting to see how he reacts to it. He’s always been a great racer, and I think he’ll definitely be running at the front; it’ll make F1 quite interesting.”What may make his season more interesting is a promise to be more aggressive. Stoner said he’d been “too clean and too polite with my passing, so when people would try and block me, I didn’t want to make people run wide, but nobody cared when they did it to me. From now on, I didn’t really care, and I made my overtakes when I wanted to.”Those five races in the middle of the season when the bike was working well and they’re my kind of circuits where I normally have much better results, and it didn’t happen. I’m definitely looking forward to this year. I’m not going to change too much from last year. We were fast enough, and I was ready to fight, and I’ll just try and take things step by step. And if something goes wrong, I’ll try and roll with the punches and come out fighting the next week. No season can be perfect, so I’m going to try and be as consistent as possible.”
