Australia’s Casey Stoner is content with his second place finish in Assen’s Dutch TT on Saturday, stretching his world championship lead to 28 in the process.

Stoner slotted into second place on the second of 26 laps and pressed the Texan from the eighth to the 11th laps, cutting into his lead.

Then the Repsol Honda rider felt discomfort in his shoulder in the crucial left hand corners and saw his progress blunted.

Once the 11th lap ended Spies opened the gap and Stoner made the tactical decision to protect second, which he did, and continue his record of a podium finish in every race he’s completed this year.

“Today we would have liked to challenge for the win, but the way this weekend has gone for us I’m really very happy for a podium finish and to take some valuable points,” Stoner said.

“Yesterday we weren’t happy with the bike the set-up, so today we made some changes and tried to get some more feeling, but unfortunately in the warm-up we didn’t get a proper chance to try it, which meant we started the race with a set-up we didn’t really know.

“After the crash yesterday I’m a little bit sore. In the middle part of the race I started to have some problems in the left hand corners with the shoulder, but in general we knew we didn’t really have the pace to stay with Ben [Spies].

“I tried everything possible to catch him, but he was able to retain the advantage and start to pull some more, so my congratulations to Ben, he rode a great race, but for us it was just important to get points today.”

It adds up to Stoner holding a 28 point lead, 136 to 108, over Jorge Lorenzo after seven of 18 races.