Stoner praises Ducati's consistency

The young Australian, who switched from LCR Honda to Ducati during the winter, was second fastest to Marco Melandri on the opening day of official testing at Jerez.

"We can't seem to do a one-off lap, but we're pretty happy with the consistency we've got," Stoner told autosport.com.

Stoner and Ducati had struggled to match the factory Yamahas' times in the previous test in Qatar, but Stoner insisted that the timesheets had not reflected his bike's true performance.

"Qatar, on the sheet, might not have looked so good, but if you looked at the race times, our bike's looking very competitive, and the tyres are looking great as well," he said.

"We were probably the best in Qatar for race consistency. Qualifying, we need to do a bit of work on."

Stoner believes that the rear end problem that affected his Ducati on Friday is specific to the Jerez circuit, and he hopes that it can be resolved once track conditions improve.

"It's mainly just pumping in the rear, we're still having a lot of movement in the rear," he said.

"We've solved that in the first day or two at most of the tracks we've gone to but there wasn't really enough dry time today to do anything about it. You've seen the 'Ducati wobble', but this is kind of extreme - legs and feet sort of go everywhere.

"A lot of it is to do with engine management, we can normally solve the problem with that, but unfortunately just at this circuit we seem to have a different kind of problem that we can't fix with throttle control or the engine management system.

"We've also (previously) solved it with tyres, going a little bit stiffer in construction. It's mainly because we couldn't run the stiffer tyres today because of the conditions, I think that was a main reason for the pumping."