Stoner: I was ready for Rossi.

Chinese Grand Prix winner Casey Stoner was expecting a showdown with Valentino Rossi in the closing stages of Sunday's race, but the Italian's error meant a challenge never came.

Stoner battled Rossi furiously for the first two-thirds of the race, the 21-year-old losing the lead several times through the tight sections before unleashing his Desmosedici's superior horsepower to breeze back past the Yamaha star along the 1200m Shanghai straight.

But Rossi remained in contact with Casey until out-braking himself at the end of that back straight on lap 16 of 22. It was the first significant error by either rider and forced the former five-times MotoGP champion to run wide at the hairpin, dropping him momentarily to third behind John Hopkins and handing Stoner his third victory from the first four races of the season.

"If last year someone had told me that at this point of the season I would have won three races I would have laughed!" admitted Stoner, who now holds a 15 point world championship lead over Rossi. "Anyway, today was another perfect day.

"The pace of the race was incredibly fast and we were really quick on the straights. Again we were able to take this advantage and I could just stay at the front with the lap times we were doing. The only difficult part of the track for me this weekend was the turn before the back straight where I couldn't turn so well but we worked a lot on this until we found better exit speed.

"During the race I concentrated on the lap times which weren't that easy but I could do them okay. During the closing stages, when I had less fuel load, the tyres started working even better. I'm really happy with Bridgestone - we expected higher temperatures for the race and that's what happened, which is why we ran a harder rear and we were really safe with it."

Although Stoner held an average top speed advantage of 7.8km/h over Rossi in the race - despite the Italian often benefiting from a slipstream behind the Ducati - in terms of overall lap time the pair were almost inseparable; Stoner's fastest lap being just 0.027secs quicker than Rossi's best.

"I knew Valentino was behind so I just concentrated and didn't make many mistakes. I was expecting a big fight during the last two laps but after he made his mistake I was able to control the race," confirmed Casey. "It was another fantastic race, like Qatar and Turkey, but we aren't changing our way of thinking. We are working hard, taking it race by race and doing our best every time."

"Another unbelievable race!" beamed Ducati MotoGP project manager Livio Suppo. "The bike was great, the tyres were great and Casey did another fantastic job. Leading the world championship like this is a dream come true for all of us and now we just want to keep working to keep the dream alive."