Stoner: We're more than just top speed.

Qatar Grand Prix winner Casey Stoner proved that the 2007 Ducati has more than just awesome top speed by claiming a close fourth during Friday practice at the twisty Jerez circuit, in southern Spain.

"Things are okay but I suppose we shouldn't really expect any less than what we've done today," declared the young Australian, who lapped 0.3secs slower than fastest man Carlos Checa to be the top non-Spaniard and top non-Honda rider. "Everybody is saying how fast the Ducati is [in a straight line] and how that's the only reason we were up front at the last race but here we're still sticking it in there against the hometown boys, even though there's no big straight, so the Ducati is proving it's a good package."

Despite the lack of a significant straight at Jerez, all four Ducati riders were within the top five on the maximum speed charts in both first and second free practice, with only the factory Honda of Dani Pedrosa stopping total Desmosedici domination.

Satellite Ducati rider Alex Barros set the highest speed of the day, 280.2km/h, with Stoner almost 2km/h slower in second and Pedrosa a further 0.3km/h behind in third. Barros' team-mate Alex Hofmann and Stoner's team-mate Loris Capirossi completed the speed-chart top five.

However, in terms of overall lap time, Capirossi made a much more modest start to his 250th grand prix weekend, the Italian being left just 14th in the morning session before improving to eleventh in the afternoon.

"We started this morning with a very similar setting to what we ran at Qatar and we lost most of the first session because it wasn't the best choice for this track - we were trying to find more traction but in the end that meant I didn't have enough feeling from the front," explained Loris. "So we completely changed the set-up for this afternoon, going back to more standard settings, and things started to go better.

"I can now lap easily enough around 41.5 or 41.6 but we need to make another step forward to be really okay because our target is to lap in the low 41s. Tomorrow morning I'll do a mini race run to check tyre endurance but I can honestly say I'm happy with the direction we took this afternoon and confident that we can improve more for the race," insisted the triple 2006 race winner, who lapped within 0.6secs of Checa.