Jerez GP - Free Practice
STONER UP FRONT AGAIN, CAPIROSSI CLOSE BEHIND
 Ducati
Marlboro Team men Casey Stoner and Loris Capirossi made a
promising start at gloriously sunny Jerez today, placing a
close fourth and 11th quickest after the first two practice
sessions.
World Championship leader Stoner was just three tenths down
on the fastest man of the day, proving that his Qatar-winning
Desmosedici GP7 adapts well from circuit to circuit. Capirossi
was a slender two tenths further down amongst the tightly
packed leading bunch of MotoGP riders, the top 15 separated
by just 0.984 seconds. This afternoon the Italian bettered
his morning pace by more than one second and is confident
he can move further forward tomorrow.
Casey Stoner, 4th fastest, 1m 41.171s
"Things are okay but I suppose we shouldn't really expect
any less than what we've done today. Everybody is saying how
fast the Ducati is and how that's the only reason we were
up front at the last race but here we're still sticking it
in there against the hometown boys, even though there's no
big straight, so the Ducati is proving it's a good package.
There's a few things we need to improve - we need to find
a little bit more rear grip and we need to improve the turning
a little bit through the entry and the middle of corners,
so for tomorrow we'll just tweak the suspension and geometry.
Otherwise I think we're already pretty happy with our race
set-up. We made the best tyre selection we could for this
race and we're just trying to do the best job we can with
it, same as Qatar."
Loris Capirossi, 11th fastest, 1m 41.409s
"We started this morning with a very similar setting
to what we ran at Qatar and we lost most of the first session
because it wasn't the best choice for this track - we were
trying to find more traction but in the end that meant I didn't
have enough feeling from the front. So we completely changed
the set-up for this afternoon, going back to more standard
settings, and things started to go better. I can now lap easily
enough around 41.5 or 41.6 but we need to make another step
forward to be really okay because our target is to lap in
the low 41s. Tomorrow morning I'll do a mini race run to check
tyre endurance but I can honestly say I'm happy with the direction
we took this afternoon and confident that we can improve more
for the race."
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