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Ryder Notes: Unknown
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Weather conditions changed completely about three times in qualifying. It started wet, almost dried up, then rained again and finally tried to dry up again. At the end of the hour one half of the circuit was bathed in sunshine, the other had a dark cloud dumping lots of water on it. Not ideal...
Nevertheless, any ideas anyone was harboring about Casey Stoner and Ducati's vulnerability in the wet were shot down in Le Mans two weeks ago and buried today. Stoner went to pole during the driest part of the session and at the very end put in three more laps that were quicker than anyone else managed. Significantly, Rossi was out at the same time pushing hard. He too ended the session with a run of personal best lap times but ended up third. Wet-weather wizard Chris Vermeulen is the man in the middle of the front row.
The two Aussies both owned up to a bit of luck with the timing of their first run of quick laps, and they were sat in the pits wondering when to go out on inters or cut slicks when the rains came again. Nicky Hayden actually managed to improve his time after the rains came again but ran off track when well up on the split times. Nicky admitted that he has problems when a wet track starts to clear--'I don't like that dry line stuff, it's always been a weak spot for me'. He must be feeling bad, he was actually heard to swear at the start of his post-qualifying press briefing...
So all the questions tonight center on the weather. So far we've had dry morning sessions and deluges during the afternoon. If you look at this morning's session, Pedrosa was fastest just as he was on Friday but he didn't string that many fast laps together. The men who look to have a good race set- up are - how did you guess? - Stoner and Rossi. However, this being Italy, the next two fastest men, Capirossi and Melandri, cannot be discounted.
At the other end of the timing sheets, the two Team KR bikes of Kenny and Kurtis Roberts are in for a difficult Sunday. The team only has two bikes, one for each of the brothers, so a lot of time was lost in the pit garage. Their problems really start tomorrow, they haven't got spare bikes for the riders to change to if it's a white-flag race. Team KR has either to pray conditions don't change and send both brothers out or bench Kurtis and prepare one wet bike and one dry bike for Kenny: a decision that casts Kenny Senior as Solomon. He'll deliver his judgment tomorrow morning.
ENDS...egy fecske nem csinál nyarat, viszont egy hülye százat csinál...
