The Ducati Team rider held off Valentino Rossi for the final podium spot at the Sachsenring to take his third top-three finish in the succession. Casey Stoner said that he felt the benefit of the race restart at the eni Motorrad Grand Prix Deutschland, where he took the third place after a red flag saw the Sachsenring contest run a shortened second race.Randy de Puniet’s crash on lap nine halted the original race, and the 25-minute interval before a second 21-lap contest began the allowed Stoner and his Ducati team to change the rear tyre he was using, an alteration that the Australian said made a big difference.
“I thought it was going to affect us in a bad way but it was actually helped us slightly,” said Stoner of the restart. “In the first part of the race we had a new rear tyre that wasn’t producing the grip that the tyres had been in all weekend. I just wasn’t able to keep up with the lap times being set by the Dani and Jorge.”
“For the second part of the race we went back to a tyre we were using in qualifying yesterday so it already had laps on it, and immediately it felt better with the more grip and a better feeling in mid-turn. We were able to run a lot faster lap times, maybe three or four-tenths of a second consistently. I tried to chase the top two down but didn’t quite have the pace.”
“I saw Valentino coming and he had a much higher pace than me and I thought he would just take off if he got the past. So I tried to do everything I could to stay with him and when I got an opportunity to overtake him it and came down to the last two laps,” explained Stoner. “We had a few nice passes and I just had to go for it in the last corner, and it worked out. I’m pretty happy with the result, and we managed to pick up the points when we needed to.”
