After struggling for grip once again this morning and finishing the final free practice session way down in 18th, it was soon clear that the warmer afternoon temperatures favoured his Fiat Yamaha as he posted his fastest time of the weekend so far early in the qualifying hour.
With eight minutes to go Rossi then moved into pole position with the first of his two Michelin qualifying tyres, only to be ousted by team-mate Colin Edwards less than a minute later as the Texan set his first flying lap. The last five minutes saw the usual flurry of quick laps and position-changing amongst the leading protagonists before Rossi took the top slot once again with a lap of 1min 39.453secs - before being pushed into second by Honda-mounted home hero Dani Pedrosa, who lapped just0.051secs quicker than the Italian.
"It's been an up and down weekend for us so it's good that we've achieved our number one goal of getting onto the front row," said Rossi afterwards. "It's going to be very important for tomorrow's race I think. It was a good qualifying session and my lap was quite good, but we know it's possible to be a lot quicker because last month at the test I was more than one second faster! We knew it would be difficult to match the 1min 38.394secs I did then however, because then we had four qualifying tyres and with the new tyre restrictions now we only have two.
"With the race tyre we were struggling quite a bit yesterday and this morning it was even worse, so we were a bit worried, but we looked at the situation together with Michelin and found a good solution and this afternoon we were in much better shape. I think tyres are going to be the biggest issue tomorrow and the last ten laps especially are going to be very hard and difficult for everyone," he predicted. "I think it's going to be an exciting race for the fans!"
0 comments:
Post a Comment