One year ago, Stoner arrived at Shanghai - also round four of the world championship - with a ten point lead over
Valentino Rossi and two races wins already in the bag.
The Ducati Marlboro star returns this weekend fourth in the 2008 standings, 21 points behind joint leaders
Jorge Lorenzo and
Dani Pedrosa, with one race win to his credit.
"There's a lot of races left and we're not looking at points now," said Casey. "It definitely hasn't started the way we wanted it to, but I think the points situation is not something to look at at the moment.
"Later on in the season if we're still too far behind then maybe we'll need to really look at it, but at the moment we just want to go out there, see if we can win some races - or see if we can get better results than we have been - and things will come from there," he added.
However Lorenzo, perhaps unsurprisingly, had a different perspective.
"The season started in Qatar," he smiled. "75 points [have gone]... Riders without good results so far say the season starts now, riders that have had good results say the same as me. For sure, for Casey, the season starts now!"
After making a perfect start to his title defence, with victory in the inaugural Qatar night race, Stoner finished eleventh at
Jerez - after running off track twice - and then sixth at Estoril, where a component related to his onboard camera came lose.
"These last two races definitely haven't gone to plan," he reflected. "We never really expected them to go too well, I suppose, but we didn't expect them to be as bad as they ended up.
"Jerez looks a lot worse than it should have been, we had the pace to be fifth and I would have been reasonably happy with that. We also had the pace to be a lot further up in Portugal at the end of the race, but in the beginning we had the problem with the [camera] box coming off and it affected me for quite a long time - deciding whether to come into the pits to fix it or stay out.
