World Champion Casey Stoner will start the Grand Prix of Qatar from the front row of the grid in second place, with team mate Dani Pedosa on the third row in seventh.
It was a frustrating session for Stoner who was once again plagued with chatter issues on his RC213V. He led for the majority of the session but in the end took second place with a 1'54.855 just 0.2 seconds off Yamaha's Jorge Lorenzo.
Pedrosa also experienced issues during the one hour session. In his first stop in the garage to swap bikes, the second one failed to start and disrupted his session and momentum. He finished seventh with a time of 1'55.905.
Casey Stoner:
“I'm not really happy with how qualifying went for us, it should have been a lot better especially on the soft tyre which we hadn't used all weekend. Last night we were happy with what we had improved and with the set-up in general. Then tonight we tried to improve that set-up and we just made it worse and worse. In the end we did a full circle and came back to what we had on Thursday night and we have huge chattering problems again. Now we have a lot of work to do to understand what's gone wrong and where the problem is before tomorrow. If we can make a big step forward in warm up then we can challenge for a podium and maybe fight for the win, but if the bike remains as it is at the moment, then we were going to be in for a long hard race.”
Dani Pedrosa:
“We solved a little the issues we had yesterday with the electronics, but we had other problems today. I stopped in the garage to change the bike and it didn't start, twice. I lost a lot of time there and I had to take the other bike which I didn't feel comfortable with either. It's a shame. The team couldn't do any better and nor me; from this point I lost the concentration a little and we couldn't get a better position. Seventh on the grid is not a good place to start the race, but I hope that we don't have any issues tomorrow and I can have a good race.”
Repsol Honda press release
