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Defending champion Casey Stoner described his pole position for tomorrow’s Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix as one of the hardest of his career.
But the shock of the day was a major mistake by Yamaha’s new world champion Valentino Rossi which left the Italian back in 12th place.
Stoner fought desperately to avoid a series of rapidly shredding tyres today before nailing top spot on the grid with just 30 seconds of the one-hour qualifying session remaining.
In the process he set a new qualifying record of 1min 28.665sec, beating the old mark set by American Nicky Hayden two years ago by three tenths of a second.
Stoner clinched pole ahead of Yamaha’s Spaniard Jorge Lorenzo with Honda rider Hayden third.
Rossi, who slid off and hit his head “pretty hard”, has twice won races from 11th on the grid but will have to use all his guile and talent if he is to stop Stoner winning successive home races.
The Australian’s result came after a two days of see-sawing performances — his Ducati performing well in the dry yesterday but falling back with technical problems in the wet afternoon session.
Today he said he was holding his breath as his bike tore strips of rubber from one tyre after another before he managed to salvage the last-gasp lap.
“It’s been a hard day today, basically,” Stoner said.
“In this morning’s session nothing seemed to go quite right, we were really struggling with set-up and couldn’t get the bike to work at all without bucking and weaving everywhere and making things very complicated.
“We really needed this afternoon’s session to be quite good, quite positive going into the race tomorrow and everything seemed to work reasonably well.
“We were doing some quite competitive laps on race tyres and everything felt okay.
“But once we got the qualifying tyres, my first tyre I destroyed fairly early on in the lap and there was no way of getting a decent lap time,” he said.
“To be honest I was a little bit worried because it started spinning so early on in the lap and we had two other tyres that were exactly the same as the first and we were really worried to try and make one last a lap and try and at least get into the front row.
“The second tyre, I made a couple of mistakes into turn two and then that lap was quite similar – we still destroyed the tyre too early.
“So when we went onto the third and last tyre we tried to ride a little bit differently – stand the bike up more coming out of the corners to try and get on the bigger part of the tyre and not put too much temperature through it.
“We managed just to save it long enough to have a little bit more grip coming around the last two turns and we managed to get pole.
“But it was definitely one of my hardest poles and one of my hardest qualifying sessions ever.”
Rossi said his mistake came when he went too fast into the second corner.
“I was pushing a lot with the qualifying tyre but unfortunately I went too wide at turn two and I came onto the grass on the exit,” the italian said.
“I thought I could take the bike back onto the track but as soon as I touched the muddy grass I lost control and couldn’t stop it.
“Then I bumped my head and neck pretty hard when I landed in the gravel.”
Rossi was treated in the circuit medical centre before leaving for his hotel to rest.
“Tomorrow I am sure I will feel a lot better – we have good tyres and a good set-up so I will try to ride a good race,” he said.
Of the other Australians, Chris Vermeulen was 15th fastest on his Suzuki and Ant West last on the Kawasaki.
Vermeulen said his only hope tomorrow would be a wet race.
“From 15th I’ve got no chance of running down Casey and even Valentino’s going to have a big problem from 12th,” Vermeulen said.
“I’d prefer a dry race but being realistic the rain might be the best thing for us.”
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