Ducati Day One Report

Ducati Marlboro Team rider and newly crowned World Champion Casey Stoner dominated day one of his home GP at Phillip Island today, topping both sessions despite constantly changing weather conditions. Team-mate Loris Capirossi was eighth fastest.

The day was blustery and showery, with this morning's session interrupted by a downpour. Conditions were sunnier this afternoon, though there were two brief lulls in proceedings when squalls hit the circuit after ten minutes and 45 minutes. Stoner's afternoon session ended a couple of minutes early when he slid off without injury at the slow-speed Honda hairpin.

CASEY STONER, fastest, 1m 31.132s
"This afternoon we had more dry laps than this morning, but it started to rain a couple of times, so it was on and off and off on, just frustrating really. The wind makes it a little bit of a handful round here, but we were able to be fastest, with three laps from race distance on the tyres, so we are quite happy with the bike setting and the tyres. I think I still could've gone faster at the end but unfortunately the rear end came around on me as I was tipping into the Honda hairpin, it just slid away. We're not really sure what happened, I think there must've been something on the circuit, we might go and check it out a bit later. We've still got a harder compound rear to test tomorrow and we've also got a different fairing - to make the bike more stable in windy conditions - which we're going to try. We've tested it a few times, though temperature is an issue, so first we have to make sure that conditions are cold enough and I think they are, so that might give us a bit of an advantage."

LORIS CAPIROSSI, 8th fastest, 1m 32.203s
"It has been a strange day, it seems like we came in and out of the garage a hundred times because it started raining and then the track dried and then it started raining again... and all this makes our work a bit more difficult. But I have to say I'm happy, we are going pretty well. We had just had one problem today - we thought we had two soft compound rear tyres for the day but in fact we only had one, so this afternoon I had to continue with the same tyre I used this morning. That makes me think we can go a lot better tomorrow. I'm happy with the work we've done so far, I love this track and we come into this race off a good race in Japan, so I really think we can have a good result here too."

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