Dovizioso blames errant set-up change

The Italian had been second behind his dominant Honda team-mate Dani Pedrosa on Friday, but while Pedrosa stormed to pole today, Dovizioso was 0.878 seconds slower and back on row three.

"We made a big change to the set-up of the bike in terms of weight distribution to get a better feeling with the front end, but it didn't work for us," said Dovizioso.

"I was struggling a lot with the front and at the end of the session I almost crashed - like in Brno. It is very difficult to improve your lap time when you don't have the confidence with the front."

He was unsure whether to pursue his correct set-up despite today's issues or to revert to what he had used on Friday.

"Now we have to decide whether to keep going in this set-up direction with something more radical or go back to what we had before," Dovizioso said.

"I'm disappointed to have qualified this far back for my home race, so we have some work to do tonight to find a setting that can improve things for warm-up and in the race. We've made it quite tough for ourselves, but we'll aim to get a good start and make up as many positions as possible early on."