Just ask anyone who crossed Mick Doohan or Mat Mladin: Hell hath no fury like a spiteful Aussie.

Casey Stoner showed the same Down Under venom during the holiday season, taking special delight in ruling MotoGP in his first season with Repsol Honda while supernova Valentino Rossi was winless for Ducati a year after Stoner won three races on the Desmosedici.

After he announced his decision to leave Yamaha for Ducati, Rossi criticized Stoner by saying it was impossible to measure the quality of the Desmosedici GP10 because Stoner wasn't pushing it hard enough. Rossi's longtime crew chief, Jerry Burgess, also said he could fix Ducati's persistent front-end troubles in 80 seconds.

Fast-forward one year. Rossi was winless for the first time in his 16-year Grand Prix career. And the unpredictable front end of the various flavors of GP11 confounded Burgess and the entire Ducati garage all season.

"The whole thing with Valentino saying I hadn't been pushing hard enough was nothing new," Stoner said. "At one stage, it was the Ducati was the best bike on the grid, and I had the best tires and everything else. This talk followed me and plagued me throughout my time at Ducati until Valentino got on the bike and showed that nothing different happened to when (Marco) Melandri got on the bike or Nicky (Hayden) got on it.

"I knew that when he got on the bike he was not going to be any faster than me. I was 100 percent sure of that. He complained about his shoulder injury at the start of the season, but he got his best result with his shoulder injury. As soon as his shoulder injury went, he got worse. The excuses didn't stop until the end of the season when they just had to start admitting that they didn't know what direction to go.

"The reason this championship does taste sweet has a lot to do with Valentino and Jerry and the criticism they gave us that we couldn't develop a bike and didn't know what we were doing. Clearly they are 10 times more confused than we ever were about what direction to go in."