The 21-year-old was the man to beat throughout the weekend in California as he set the pace in all three free practice sessions and then put his Desmosedici GP7 on pole position for the eleventh race of the season.

Putting the 'pole jinx' – that hadn't seen a winner from pole since Motegi last season – firmly to one side, Stoner then led the race for all bar the opening corners as he took a sixth win of the year, with Suzuki's Chris Vermeulen being the only person to get close to Stoner in the opening laps before his eased away to comfortable win.

"This would have to be my best racing weekend ever," Stoner, who celebrated his win with a two-year extension to his Ducati contract [see separate story], admitted. "We also had a great weekend at the Sachsenring last week, it just didn't work out in the race. Today everything was perfect, the tyres, the bike, everything was working great the whole weekend.

"We managed to be fast in every session and after all this hard work we did it in the race. We also broke the long run of no pole sitter winning a race - the last person to do it was on a Ducati and the next person to do it was on a Ducati. I'm absolutely stoked about this race. We went out in morning warm-up and we were able to do really low 22s and even high 21s with half race distance on the tyres, so we felt pretty confident. At the start of the race I dipped into the 22s, I wanted to see how fast everybody else could go. I was pulling away from Dani [Pedrosa] by about half second lap, then Chris got in front of him and started to chase me down. I thought he was obviously pushing a bit harder so I decided to up my pace and I was slowly but surely pulling a gap.

"Chris was very fast, but I feel like I had a little bit better rear tyre, we had selected a pretty hard rear which really started working towards the end, so I just continued to push throughout the race. I didn't think there was going to be a big group at the front, I knew we had the set-up and it was just a matter of everything going to plan for us with no bad luck and everything worked."