Stoner struggles in the wet

Defending champion Casey Stoner is facing a dilemma ahead of Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix with his Ducati floundering in today’s wet conditions and the team at a loss to know how to tame it.

Stoner was fastest in this morning’s first practice session in the dry but when rain fell he slipped to fourth on the timesheets.

The Queenslander, who last weekend lost his world MotoGP title to Italian Valentino Rossi, was not optimistic the issue could be corrected in time for the race.

He was a whopping 1.765 seconds off the pace set by former world champion Nicky Hayden’s Honda in the second run.

Fellow Australian Chris Vermeulen, who was a lowly 14th in the dry, slipped past Stoner in the wet, putting his Suzuki third on the lap charts behind Hayden and the Honda of Italian Andrea Dovizioso.

Stoner said his engineers identified the problem with his bike but so far had found no solution.

“Since Indianapolis we’ve been struggling a little bit in the wet,” Stoner said. “It’s something that’s quite strange. We’ve looked at the telemetry and it’s obvious what’s going wrong but it’s difficult to find a solution.

“We tried a few things today but they still weren’t working and we’ll have to make another big step tomorrow.

“We’re going to try a few different things tomorrow but considering we’re setting the bike up quite similar to the way we have in the past, maybe small differences are making a bigger problem.”

He said the power was not being delivered properly.

“We’ve just got no drive and without the grip in the rear and through the middle of the corner we’re losing turning in the front.

“You normally need a lot more grip in the rear to make the front turn and hop around and we just can’t find that traction.

“You can see on the telemetry that the rear end for some reason just looks rock hard, it goes down to a certain point and then it doesn’t seem to move, it doesn’t find any traction and it doesn’t try and help me through the turns and on the exits.

“Unfortunately when the suspension goes rock-hard like that then the only way for that force to go is through the tyre and the tyre can’t handle that much force and then I start to spin and the bike steps out quickly.”

The forecast for Sunday’s race is for showers but Phillip Island is notorious for unreliable weather and Stoner said he could not afford to rely on official predictions.

“There’s no issues in the dry, we just need to figure out things in the wet,” he said. “We know what the problem is but we don’t understand why.

“We can’t seem to fix it, we’ve gone very, very soft in the rear spring and we’re still having the same issue.

“I don’t know if it’s a tyre problem because I had the same drama in Motegi (Japan, last week) and similar problems in Indianapolis.”

Stoner began the opening day of this GP in sizzling form, dipping under the track lap record.

He set a fastest lap of 1min 30.094sec compared to Italian Marco Melandri’s mark of 1:30.332s, set during the 2005 Grand Prix.

Stoner had outpaced Valentino Rossi by three quarters of a second but, as rain began to fall and saturated the track, he fell off the pace dramatically.

Hayden’s wet session time of 1:38.820 meant he was the only rider to break the 1:39 mark. Stoner, even with his problems in the rain, was still three tenths of a second faster than Rossi while Queenslander Ant West, a renowned wet weather racer, improved from last in the dry to 12th in the wet.

Hayden had the opposite problem to Stoner today, grateful when rain started to fall.

“I could have done with some more dry track time to sot out some problems we had this morning,” Hayden said.

“I was struggling with traction and without traction here you’re not going anywhere. I need to be going faster in the dry, we’ve definitely got some work to do so we’ll keep pushing.”

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