Sylvain Guintoli couldn’t believe what Casey Stoner did in Ducati test five years after he retired

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Casey Stoner returned to the Ducati MotoGP team as a test rider years after he retired. And Sylvain Guintoli was stunned by what he saw from the Australian legend.

Stoner retired rather abruptly in 2012 when he was just 27 years old. He said he’d fallen out of love with MotoGP despite winning the title the previous year.

Having handed his seat to Marc Marquez, he remained part of the Honda set-up in a testing role between 2013 and 2016. Stoner subsequently moved to Ducati, the team with whom he won the championship in 2007.

There was inevitably talk that he could return to MotoGP in a wildcard capacity, or as a replacement for injured riders. That never materialised, but there were certainly signs that he would have been competitive.

Casey Stoner set a 2:01 on his third lap of testing for Ducati in 2016

TNT Sports pundit Sylvain Guintoli was a test rider for Suzuki in 2017, and he ‘vividly’ remembers how Stoner performed in a private outing in Malaysia.

He apparently needed just three laps to set a 2:01, which is a ‘very fast’ lap time around the Sepang circuit. Indeed, Andrea Dovizioso set Ducati’s fastest dry-weather time with a 2:00.7 at the 2016 Malaysian GP, which took place only a few months earlier.

Guintoli and Neil Hodgson are both confident that Stoner, who’s now 39 years old, could reach a competitive pace on a 2025 bike too.

“If he was to go out now on a GP bike, how far [off] do you think he would be?” Guintoli said during practice at Misano last month.

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Hodgson replied: “I don’t think he’d be far at all. Give him a day with a few sets of tyres, by the end of the day, I think he’d be right in the ballpark. You just know it.

Guintoli then said: “Do you remember when he stopped riding and then he came back as a Ducati test rider? He had a couple of years off. We got to Sepang and it was the test rider test, and bear in mind it was a green track, [on the] third lap, he was on a 2:01.

“I remember that vividly. A 2:01 around Sepang is very fast. He was instantly quick. I remember being shocked by that, and that was some time ago. He was miles quicker than me.”

The offer Francesco Bagnaia must make to Casey Stoner

Stoner was recently back in the Ducati garage offering assistance to Francesco Bagnaia. Before Marc Marquez’s recent title win, they were the brand’s two biggest MotoGP legends.

It’s said that Stoner saw something Bagnaia’s engineers couldn’t, which perhaps helped the Italian deliver a perfect weekend at Motegi.

Stoner is clearly one of the most naturally gifted riders in premier-class history, which is why he was so often able to set a blistering pace at the outset. But he combines this with a formidable technical mind.

Bagnaia’s coach Manuel Poggiali had been warning Ducati that his bike was shaking, but these comments weren’t taken seriously until Stoner intervened.

Perhaps the two-time world champion should contact the Queensland native about taking on a permanent role within his setup, an arrangement Ducati may also be open to.