Capirossi admits to 'terrible' race

The race marked Capirossi's 250th MotoGP start, but there was little to celebrate as he struggled to make progress from 15th on the grid, while his Ducati teammate Casey Stoner impressed again with a hard-charging drive to fifth after a poor first lap.

"The thing is that I don't want to blame anyone: I'm not riding as well as usual so I think I'll need to understand and we'll have some homework to do," Capirossi told Italia1 television.

"My riding style is fairly aggressive and I'm struggling to ride this bike. When we try to overcome that through electronics we end up worsening other aspects.

"I'm struggling a bit to adapt on some tracks, so when I try to extract more than what I can do I put what we have in crisis. This could be absolutely my problem.

"As for the technical side, I don't think we are doing bad at all, because we won a race and Casey today had a fine fifth place, so this means they've worked well at home, but they have to do something different for me."

Capirossi remains confident that he can overcome his current difficulties - perhaps as early as round three in Istanbul.

"This wasn't a nice race for me, it was colourless..." he said. "I had a really terrible race today, but there are still many races ahead and we most of all need to understand the reasons why and I think the next race in Turkey may go differently.

"In any case I think a rider doesn't unlearn how to ride a bike from winter testing to the first races.

"I think I'm still able to ride the bike but I just had a bit of a difficult time but I've had many of those in my career so I'm not scared about it at all.

"In fact I think I'll come out of it stronger than before."