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…

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