Round 5Pedrosa finishes second in a Catalan GP plagued by problems

After qualifying on Saturday, you said "The bikes were well setup for these dry conditions and high temperatures. If conditions remain the same for the race, we have a good chance of winning. The trouble is, the race day forecast is for probable low temperatures and rain. If that's the case, I can't say what will happen." You were right to be worried, but I get the impression that it was an even more difficult race than you could have imagined. In France, wet conditions lost you a race you'd probably have won in the dry. This time must have been even more disappointing, since you were even better positioned to win."

To put it bluntly, I have no excuse to offer. Conditions changed, and we didn't manage to get the setup right for them. That's basically why we lost. Both riders chose hard tires based on the data from practice and qualifying, but Casey especially was in two minds about that even as he took his place on the grid. It certainly wasn't a mistake selecting hard tires after the experience of Friday and Saturday, but we couldn't have imagined we'd get such poor grip from the track on Sunday.

Dani Pedrosa is definitely in the running for the title, but problems toward the end of this race prevented him doing better than second place. Casey Stoner was plagued with grip problems from start to finish that denied him a place on the podium. Tell us why they chose hard tires, and why these didn't deliver the required grip.

For the race, air temperature was 27° and the track was 40°. The closest we'd had to those conditions was in free practice on Saturday morning, when air was 24° and track was 36°. Both riders used hard tires for that session, and Dani had top time, with Casey second. So I certainly don't think anyone was mistaken in picking hard for the race. What we couldn't predict was the effect of the weather – rain during morning warm up reduced the grip of the track surface. After the race, Casey said the track surface had gone back to what it was in FP1 on Friday, and soft tires would have been the better choice. On the other hand, Dani had no doubts about the hard tires, but needed a different suspension setting to counter the poor grip. Both suffered from the same lack of grip, but they have slightly different ideas about what caused it.

Can you go into a bit more detail on this point?

As I mentioned, the session with conditions most similar to what we got in the race was Saturday morning practice. If the surface had been exactly the same as then, the race would have gone as we expected. But the effect of the rain was to reduce grip on the line. Casey and Dani have very different riding styles, so we would have needed different responses. For Casey, it would have been better to leave his suspension as it was, and switch to soft tires. The hard tires were good for Dani, but we should have set his suspension softer. What happened was that we didn't succeed in setting the bikes up to match the changed conditions.

I can't remember when we last saw these two riders struggling like this. Pedrosa looked like he was in with a chance to win, but at the end he had nothing left to give. Stoner had a really lackluster race.

This was Dani's first home GP in two years, and he hasn't had a first place yet this season so we really wanted to help him win. And in fact, everything looked good – I think we would have won if only it hadn't rained in the morning, or if we had responded better. Because Casey was riding on hard tires, he knew he'd be struggling a bit in the early laps so he wasn't surprised by his pace or position then – the problem was that the grip never improved. And not only did he suffer from lack of grip, he was getting chatter too. This must have been a bitterly disappointing race for Casey – from start to finish, he never had the chance to ride the way he can.

This year there seem to be a lot of races where Honda has been troubled by changing weather and surface conditions. Can you talk about that?

It's true that in both France and Catalunya, we made the mistake of committing to a too-restrictive setup that didn't allow us to respond to changed conditions. Looking at this race, Casey also had trouble with chatter. We've been struggling with this chatter problem for a few years now, and the more we do the more difficult it seems to be to solve. But this race really made us sit up and think again. It now seems possible that the chatter in the RC213V might have a different cause than the previous bikes. Whichever way you look at it though, Jorge beat us soundly in these two races. He's fast in the wet and in the dry, and I think he has an excellent bike. We do have some good points going for us, but in general we have more weaknesses at present. We knew in the winter tests that this was going to be a very tough season, and the last two races have made us feel that very keenly.

You have a test after this race. I guess this will be an important one for you?

From the next race in England, we'll be switching to using only the new spec Bridgestone front tires. In the races so far, we've been using a mix of old and new specs, but we haven't had the chance to do a proper test of the new spec tires. So this test will be very important. We'll be doing a tire test for the new specs, as well as testing a lot of new parts. As I said, we knew it was going to be a hard year, but France and Catalunya have been a real spur. We're going to have to try a lot harder if we're going to catch Jorge now. It's a shame this race put an end to Casey's run of 19 podium places. I really feel bad about not being able to help him do better, and also for Dani not winning his home GP. For the coming races, we'll be trying even harder to put our guys back up there in first and second. And we'll be doing some serious work in Monday's test with that in mind.