Stoner not worried about points situation

The Ducati rider, dominant in 2007 with ten victories on the way to the title, has dropped down to fourth place in the championship after poor races in Jerez and Estoril.

Stoner won the season opener in Qatar but then was only 11th in Spain and sixth in Portugal. He is now 21 points behind championship leaders Jorge Lorenzo and Dani Pedrosa.

But the Australian says he is not looking at the standings yet, and he is focused on returning to winning ways.

"There's a lot of races left and we are not looking at the points now," said Stoner. "It definitely hasn't started the way we wanted but I think the points situation is not something to look at at the moment.

"Later on the season, if you are too far behind then we should look at it, but at the moment we just want to go out there and see if we can win some races and get some better results and things will come from there."

Stoner admitted the start of the season had gone worse than expected, although he reckons his last two races should not have been so bad.

In Jerez, the Ducati rider went off track a couple of times, while in Estoril he had a problem with the television camera on his bike that slowed him down.

"The first races definitely haven't gone to plan," Stoner told a news conference in China. "We never really expected them to go too well, I suppose, but we didn't expect them to be as bad as they ended up.

"Jerez looks a lot worse than it should have been. We had the pace to be fifth and we would have been reasonably happy with that. And also we had the pace to be a lot further up in Portugal during the race. But at the beginning we had the problem with the (camera) box coming off.

"So things haven't gone well for us in these last few races, but the season started strong. We had a very good pre-season testing and I'm expecting to pick up the pace in the next races."