Casey Stoner reflects on 2007 Ducati dominator: ‘It wasn’t really good at anything’

Casey Stoner says the Ducati GP7 he dominated the 2007 MotoGP season on “wasn’t really good at anything” but it “did the job for me”.

The Australian moved to Ducati in 2007 for his second year in the premier class after a fast, if crash-prone, rookie campaign with LCR on the Honda in 2006.

Ducati had been solid in its first four years in the class, but Stoner stunned when he went on to win 10 grands prix and win the first of his two MotoGP titles by 125 points over Honda’s Dani Pedrosa.

The next-best Ducati in the standings was Loris Capirossi in seventh, who won once - ironically at the Japanese GP in which Stoner was crowned champion.

Speaking this year on the Ducati Diaries podcast, Stoner opened up on how difficult the GP7 was despite his ability to dominate on it.

“It wasn’t, except for fourth, fifth gear, really good at anything,” he began.

“It didn’t go round the corners. It was pretty good under brakes, it was pretty stable under brakes.

“That’s without a doubt. It didn’t have strong braking power, but it was stable, which was probably the first bike I’d ever ridden with such stability on the braking.

“So, that was a really nice part to have about it. Fourth, fifth and sixth gear of course it just came into its own.

“But the first three gears, we’d just get absolutely eaten alive. So, any tracks that you come to where you really have to accelerate and pump out of the corners, we were gone, we really, really struggled.

“But we just tried to minimise the weaknesses and maximise its strengths. And everybody saw what it’s strengths were: its top speed, and with its stop speed we had some stable braking.

“So, we basically just tried to sit at the front of races as much as we could and make everybody else work for it, because if we didn’t qualify well or we weren’t at the front of the race early, it was very hard to chase people down because if they could get a few clean laps going it was very hard to make the most of that bike.

“So, basically, we sot of tried to maximise that strength and just tried to deal with whatever we could through the corners because it really was very, very hard to get the thing to turn.

“And I think with stability like that, it was running too low, there wasn’t enough pitch in it, which I finally got them to make some changes in the later years when we didn’t have that speed advantage but we got the bike to turn a bit better.

“But in that year, it was certainly a challenge, but it did the job for me. My team did an amazing job, they were the same as myself.”

He added: “I felt so privileged to have the opportunity to race a factory team. I’d just come from, realistically I’d pretty much just signed for Yamaha, and then two years in a row they pulled the contract out from under our feet at the eleventh hour and basically didn’t have a ride for the next year.

“But fortunately we signed with Ducati. I had motivation to basically show Yamaha they made a mistake by taking that away.

“So, I thought if I could get a couple of podiums and maybe one win this year, that’s my goal.”