Still room for improvement, says Stoner

In his final weekend with the squad that took him to the world championship three years ago, Stoner has been quickest in three of the four sessions so far and beat Jorge Lorenzo to pole by 0.3 seconds today.

But despite that pace, Stoner was adamant that there was more to come.

"There are a couple of corners on this track that I really enjoy and have a lot of fun on, and a few corners that I'm really struggling with today," said Stoner.

"We've got to improve that situation tomorrow and get a better feeling with the front end.

"The way everything's gone this weekend, we can't really complain. We've just got to try and improve it a little bit before tomorrow's race and see what we can do."

Stoner does not think he necessarily goes into the grand prix as the favourite.

"Everybody else is not too far off the pace," he said. "The times are very, very close.

"We don't know if anybody might pull something out of the bag tomorrow morning in the warm-up. So we'll just keep our heads down and see what happens."