Reigning MotoGP world champion Casey Stoner says it's too early to be counting points and that at this stage in the season a return to winning races is his main priority.

One year ago, Stoner arrived at Shanghai - also round four of the world championship - with a ten point lead over Valentino Rossi and two races wins already in the bag.

The Ducati Marlboro star returns this weekend fourth in the 2008 standings, 21 points behind joint leaders Jorge Lorenzo and Dani Pedrosa, with one race win to his credit.

"There's a lot of races left and we're not looking at points now," said Casey. "It definitely hasn't started the way we wanted it to, but I think the points situation is not something to look at at the moment.

"Later on in the season if we're still too far behind then maybe we'll need to really look at it, but at the moment we just want to go out there, see if we can win some races - or see if we can get better results than we have been - and things will come from there," he added.

After making a perfect start to his title defence, with victory in the inaugural Qatar night race, Stoner finished eleventh at Jerez - after running off track twice - and then sixth at Estoril, where a component related to his onboard camera came lose.

"These last two races definitely haven't gone to plan," he reflected. "We never really expected them to go too well, I suppose, but we didn't expect them to be as bad as they ended up.

"Jerez looks a lot worse than it should have been, we had the pace to be fifth and I would have been reasonably happy with that. We also had the pace to be a lot further up in Portugal at the end of the race, but in the beginning we had the problem with the [camera] box coming off and it affected me for quite a long time - deciding whether to come into the pits to fix it or stay out.

"Things haven't gone well for us in the last two races, but the season started strong, we had very good pre-season testing and I'm expecting to pick up the pace again in these next few races," he declared confidently.

Stoner clinched a memorable victory over Rossi at Shanghai last year, when his powerful Desmosedici proved devastatingly effective along the 1.2km back straight, but overall Casey thinks the layout lacks excitement.

"The circuit is not too bad, in the wet the grip is unbelievable, but the track itself has a lot of tight technical corners that on a bike are more of a pain than anything," he said. "There's a few fast corners that are a lot of fun coming onto the back straight, but immediately after that is one of the tightest corners in grand prix. Just a lot of difficult twisty corners that don't make it a lot of fun."

First free practice takes place at Shanghai on Friday.