De Puniet buoyed by practice form

The French rider was three tenths of a second behind championship leader Casey Stoner on combined times, and hopes to remain amongst the frontrunners all weekend.

"I've been happy with the bike since this morning, when we immediately found a good setting," de Puniet said.

"In the first session, I did 24 laps with the same rear tyre and my times were very good. I tried a harder compound but was sliding a bit so I went back to the first one.

"We'll try to improve the ZX-RR a little for Saturday but it's already very good for the race. We just need to perfect some little bits."

He also revealed that he was riding with a broken rib, having sustained the injury when he tangled with the Repsol Hondas at the first corner of the Misano race.

"I didn't realise my rib was broken until I got it checked out last week and, this morning, it was a bit painful to move on the bike; I was much more confident this afternoon after it had subsided a bit," said de Puniet.

His Kawasaki teammate Anthony West was only 14th fastest, albeit just half a second slower than de Puniet.

"I'm still struggling a bit with chatter and rear grip but I'm sure we can improve things tomorrow," West said.

"And I've been trying to change the position of the bike in corners and shifting my weight around to make it feel more stable. It feels like it's moving around a lot in the Parabolica, so I don't feel too confident through there, but I'm not losing much time through the rest of the track, just little parts here and there.

"Once we can fix that I can move up and be more consistent. The top speed down the straight's pretty good and, overall, the new engine felt great: really strong."

Kawasaki's technical manager Naoya Kaneko said the team were optimistic about the rest of the weekend.

"The times today have been very tight, with most riders within a second of each other, so there's actually very little gap between Randy and Anthony," he said.

"Randy has a found good package and the machine set up seems to be okay; we just need to polish it a bit with some small adjustments.

"West has a few problems we can improve upon, but he's working hard adapting to our bike and developing the skills needed to set it up and he's really making progress."