Positive day for Ducati in China

From Marlboro Ducati

The Grand Prix of China kicked off Friday with Casey Stoner back on the pace, the World Champion lapping second fastest in the morning session and quickest in the afternoon to end the day on top of the timesheets with a time of 2:00.215.

Marco Melandri suffered some technical problems during the morning session but recovered to improve his feeling with the machine in the afternoon. He wound up 14th with a 2:01.913. The setback meant the Italian was unable to complete the entire programme that was planned for him but he hopes to make continued progress Saturday.

"It's more comfortable for us here," Stoner said. "The last two races didn't go well in practice but I believe they could have still been two decent results and for a variety of reasons they turned into not so good ones. We couldn't seem to get things right, no matter what we did or what we tried, but this weekend we seem to be back in control again.

"Front feel is a lot better here, I'm slowly getting my confidence back and I think we can continue to do that over the rest of the weekend. We're getting better and better with rear grip but we're still nowhere near perfect. We struggled last year turning the bike in the fast corners at some tracks and we're still working on it now. We're going to make a couple of big changes to one of the bikes tomorrow and hopefully that can improve the lap time."