With this season's MotoGP World Championship opener less than two weeks away, Dennis Noyes takes a microscope to the 2012 preseason.
Honda’s reigning champion, Casey Stoner, reminds paddock veterans of Mick Doohan. Jeremy Burgess used to say that Mick’s goal was to keep his name at the top of the timing monitors from the first free session right through qualifying. The reason was not so much to boost Mick’s always-strong confidence as it was to keep the pressure on his rivals.
If Casey Stoner had packed up and gone back to the motel with ten minutes to go on the final day of practice at Jerez, he still would have established the best pace over a 10-lap run and still would have ended the preseason with the best overall record. On a cooling track and with the hard work done, however, Casey went out and wiped Jorge Lorenzo's name off the top of the chart.
Casey uncorked a fast lap late in the third and final day of the Jerez IRTA tests, less than ten minutes from the end of 24 combined hours of testing from Friday morning to Sunday evening, to leave Spain with the best time of 1´38.780, bettering Yamaha’s Jorge Lorenzo by 0.173 and Stoner’s Repsol Honda teammate, Dani Pedrosa, by 0.377. Only three other riders, Ben Spies, Cal Crutchlow and Valentino Rossi, managed to stay within a second of Stoner.
That final lap was good enough to deny Yamaha and Lorenzo any preseason bragging rights (although still well off the absolute Jerez motorcycle record of 1'38.189 set by Lorenzo on his Yamaha 800 back in the heady days of Michelin qualifying tires.) Stoner was a tenth of a second off his own best qualifying time from last year but said that the track was not giving the same grip as last year. (The new Bridgestones will be discussed later in this piece.)...more