Repsol Honda Team face the Silverstone challenge

2012-06-12 12:08
This weekend, the 2012 MotoGP World Championship is back in action in Great Britain, where the Silverstone circuit will open its doors for the third successive year to host the British Grand Prix, the sixth round of the season.



Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa arrive at one of the fastest tracks on the calendar, looking to make the most of each practice session to work on their RC213V machine and set up the new Bridgestone front tyre that will be the standard issue in MotoGP for the remainder of the season.



The Repsol Honda riders began working with the new tyre on the Monday test day after the Catalunya race and both will be hoping for dry conditions in all the sessions so they have maximum time to work on set up.



Last year, Casey won at Silverstone - one of the most difficult races of the year in wet conditions which Dani missed due to his collarbone injury. Casey's pole position in 2011 remains as the fastest lap in this track (2'02.020) and Dani has the top speed record (323,9 kms/h) from 2010, when Silverstone circuit first replaced Donnington Park as the venue of the British GP.

CASEY STONER World Championship Position: 2nd with 95 points
"I'm definitely looking forward to going to Silverstone, it's a track that I really do enjoy. I wish that we still went through the old part of the track, unfortunately we don't go through there now and the new section is very, very tight. The rest of the track is fantastic though, it's fast and makes the heart beat very quick! The Monday test in Catalunya was a positive step for us, but we're still far from perfect. We definitely made some progress with reducing the chatter but we will have to wait until we get on track on Friday to see if what we found also works at Silverstone. Again, we'll be hoping for dry weather so we can maximise every minute of track time to prepare for Sunday's race".

DANI PEDROSA World Championship Position: 3rd with 85 points
"I missed the Silverstone race last year due to my injury, so I'm especially excited to go back racing at this track. As I said after the test we did in Catalunya, we were working a lot on different settings on the bike, we had some improvements and I hope we can make another step forward in Silverstone. It's a fast track, with many changes of direction and we need an agile bike and a good set up for both the fast and slow corners. In Britain, the weather is always very unstable, but let's see if we are lucky this time and we can enjoy dry conditions".

Source: Repsol Honda Team

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