Stoner: Dani was too quick

The world champion sprinted into a lead of almost a second on the opening lap after making a rocket of a getaway.

But, despite the 22-year-old Australian's Ducati being the class of the field all season and taking ten wins, he could not stay with home hero Pedrosa's Repsol Honda after it got by him on the sixth lap of the race and went on to win.

"I'm plenty happy with that though," Stoner told Eurosport. "I wasn't as confident as everybody thought I was coming into the weekend.

"We knew Dani was going to very fast here, and we expected Marco [Melandri] to be right up at the front too.

"When Dani passed me he started to go away, and I had to push so hard just to stay within one and a half to two seconds of him. I was expecting his pace to cool at some point, but it just didn't, and it was as much as I could do just to hang in there.

Stoner pushed so hard in his efforts to keep up with Pedrosa, who won for the second time in 2007 and secured second place in the championship, that he made a mistake with five laps to go and lost half a second.

"I had absolutely nothing left," added Stoner after a race in which he eventually finished five seconds behind the winner.

Stoner's second place meant that he won the world championship by 125 points, the fifth biggest winning margin in Moto GP history, and a gap only surpassed by Valentino Rossi in 2002 and 2005, and his hero Mick Doohan in 1994 and 1997.