Just five days after packing up at the Motegi circuit in Japan the Ducati Marlboro Team was back on track today for the opening free practice of the Malaysian Grand Prix. The Sepang circuit is again in stark contrast to preceding races and, as at Aragon and Motegi, the challenge for Casey Stoner and Nicky Hayden is to swiftly find the right set-up for their Desmosedici GP10 machines.
Following on from back-to-back wins in the last two races Stoner was fourth fastest today, just over a second outside his own circuit record here, completing just sixteen laps following a minor crash early in the session. Hayden lapped just 0.8 seconds slower than his team-mate, a relatively marginal gap around the second longest circuit on the calendar, but finds himself in fifteenth on the time sheets and with positions to make up in tomorrow’s qualifying practice.
CASEY STONER (Ducati Marlboro Team) 4th – 2’03.160
“I’m not really happy with the way things went today. We had a small crash at the beginning of the session so had to switch bikes and do a lot of work to get it feeling better. Every time I went out there was some small problem and we seemed to take a while to find a reasonable setting. By the end I had established a good feeling and I wanted to make a better lap time on the second lap of my final run but I ran wide in turn one and that was that. We’ll take this data and try to improve the bike for tomorrow. We seem to be struggling most of all with the rear, just like at Motegi, but once we solve that I’m sure we’ll see major improvements with the rest of the bike.”
NICKY HAYDEN (Ducati Marlboro Team) 15th – 2’03.947
“We have picked up where we left off in Japan, which is not a good thing. We struggled a lot, right from the beginning, over the bumps mainly. I have a lot of front chatter, we got rear chatter too, and I cannot carry any good corner speed. We’re 1.2 seconds off the top, which may not seem that much but the reality is that it is a lot when the field is as tight as it is right now. That kind of gap is pretty much going to send you to the back. We definitely need to do something for tomorrow because today was not good.”
Circuit Record: Casey Stoner (Ducati – 2009), 2’02.108 – 163.566 Km/h
Best Pole: Valentino Rossi (Yamaha – 2009), 2’00.518 – 165.724 Km/h
