Casey Stoner continued his remarkable run of performances with
a stirring ride in this afternoon's French GP qualifying session that
puts him second on the grid, just 0.094 seconds off pole position.
World Championship leader Stoner has now qualified on the front
two rows of the grid at all five races so far this year, today's
second place his best grid slot since the season-opening Qatar
GP. Even more impressive today was his pace in race trim - a run
of low 1m 35s laps that he finished off with an amazing 1m 34.7s
on well used tyres. Stoner's best lap on qualifying tyres was
almost three tenths inside last year's 990cc Le Mans pole,
highlighting the superb performance of Ducati's 800cc GP7 and its
Bridgestone tyres. CS27: "I haven't been off the front two rows
this year which is a big surprise for me because I'm not usually
much of a qualifier. I thought we might've had the pole today but
Colin [Edwards] just pipped me at the end. Anyway, the bike and
tyres have been working brilliant all weekend. Today we capita-
lised on the work we did yesterday - we made a few more minor
improvements, improving rear grip a little bit and getting the
corner entry a little better, so it's helping me all round. This
afternoon we were doing low 35s and I did a 34.7 with tyres that
had done over 20 laps so we're looking pretty strong. I'm not
doing anything much different myself this year but I've gone up a
level in team and found a bike and tyres that suit me, so the level
of everything has jumped up and we're able to keep that level
through most racetracks and most sessions, so it's real good. I've heard all sorts of weather forecasts for tomorrow, so we'll just have to
wait and see what tomorrow holds, you never really know what it's going to do here from hour to hour."