"We expected a difficult race here, but actually not as difficult as this!" confessed the Fiat Yamaha star. "We haven't been fast here in Qatar since last week's night test but, despite this, I thought we might be able to fight for the podium. Tonight however it was really difficult and now we have to understand the reason for this result. After five or six laps I started doing 56.4 and 56.5 and from then on I couldn't improve on that pace until the end. I was very fast in braking, but not so fast in the corners."
It was a frustrating result for Rossi, who had already been forced to watch all three Michelin-shod M1s qualify on the front row - and he came close to being beaten by two of them in the race, with Tech 3's
James Toseland crossing the finish line less than a second behind.
Nevertheless, Rossi insisted that Stoner's dominant performance indicated the potential of his new tyres.
"We know that we can make our
Bridgestone tyres work better than this, because they are winning tyres and tonight they showed it once again," he explained. "Throughout the winter, at all tracks, we were very fast and this is the only one where we were not. Now our task is to understand why this happened.
"We had a couple of ideas to try but in the end we decided to stick to what we know because we need some more time to understand how to improve and how to be faster. We know we can do better than this and so we just need to gather all the information and use it in the best way for the next race.
"Finally I want to say congratulations to Lorenzo for a great debut tonight; honestly I'm not surprised because I knew he was fast and talented, but he did very well tonight in a hard race so well done to him," concluded Vale.
Stoner and Rossi were the only Bridgestone riders to finish in the top seven.
"Casey was the only Bridgestone rider to get competitiveness from the race tyres over the full race distance, and he set some very impressive times, but the results from other riders on our tyres shows that we have more work to do on our low temperature compounds," admitted Hiroshi Yasukawa, director of Bridgestone Motorsport.
