Dani Pedrosa had to unhappily settle for a second place in his home race after a large wheelie with five laps to go in the race made him lose his lead to Jorge Lorenzo and then struggle to keep up with the Yamaha rider.
This is Pedrosa’s fourth podium of the season and he is third in the standings and 35 points from Lorenzo.
“A second place is always a second, but I really wanted to win today, I cannot feel happy.
We’ve worked very hard during the practice sessions to be ready to win but finally we couldn’t make it, so it’s a little bit disappointing.
I pushed as much as I could but in the final laps I had some issues to stay on the racing line.
I pushed my best in the middle of the race, I tried to attack but with 10 laps remaining I couldn’t keep the pace, it was hard to control the bike on braking and in the exit of the corners, so I was defensive because I knew my corner speed was not so good.
I made a mistake and I had a big wheelie, so Jorge got past me and I couldn’t follow him.
We cannot be happy today, but I have to congratulate my team because they worked very hard this weekend and we have to keep pushing for the next races to start winning soon,” said Pedrosa.
Casey Stoner’s fourth place in today’s race in Catalunya has stopped his run of consecutive podiums at nineteen, only Valentino Rossi and Giacomo Agostini have more.
The soon-to-retire Repsol Honda rider with hindsight rued the hard tire choice – the track temperature dropped more than 12° from yesterday’s qualifying session.
This latest result leaves Stoner 20 points behind leader Lorenzo in the MotoGP championship standings.
“I’m a little disappointed, we gave it everything at the end but we just didn’t have the pace, especially in the beginning with the hard tyre,” said Stoner.
“It seemed that only Dani could really make that tyre work today and he made it work better than us.
With the performance we had during the weekend we expected to be a little stronger throughout the race, we knew the beginning was going to be tough but we believed that towards the end we would be able to run a higher pace.
We weren’t sure if the softer tyre was going to be a problem for us in the race so we took the safer option today.
We thought we had a better bike and better pace, but it didn’t come together.
Still we came home with some points and we have the test here tomorrow to work on the chatter issues so I’m sure we’ll be back fighting at the top again soon.
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