Australia’s Casey Stoner says he is unconcerned by arch-rival Valentino Rossi’s domination of MotoGP pre-season testing. Stoner’s Ducati was once again pipped by Rossi on a Yamaha in the second test at Sepang in Malaysia, but the former world champion declared himself happy with his progress. Rossi clocked the quickest time, less than two tenths of a second quicker than Stoner as the Italian maintained the lead in the build-up to the first race of the season at Qatar in April. Stoner clipped a tenth of a second off his best time from the last test at Sepang three weeks ago and reported encouraging feedback from the new bike. “Everything was very positive and we have made a big step from the last test,” Stoner said. “In general the bike felt pretty good from the beginning. “We didn’t really change too much, we tried a lot of different things on both bikes but in the end we came back to what we started with, and the bike in general is very well balanced. “It’s working quite well and we could have gone quite a lot faster but we definitely have a little bit in reserve so we’re very happy at the moment,” he said. Earlier, Stoner said it was hard to judge the true speed of Rossi’s bike from the test times. “They look good but they do every year and they always seem to do well at this track – but here is a bit of an Achilles heel for us,” Stoner said. “We’ve had a couple of good tests here and a good race but otherwise we’ve struggled here a little bit more than the other circuits. “This bike is going to be a better package for the whole championship rather than one or two tracks. “In the past our bike has worked well in some tracks and then been difficult in others. This bike has a much better all round feeling and I’m looking forward to some other tracks and see how it goes,” he said. AAP Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Source: Brisbane Times