Edwards encouraged after strong start

Colin Edwards was pleased with Yamaha's first day of work in practice for the Qatar Grand Prix after he and teammate Valentino Rossi finished on top of the times

Rossi was fastest in the afternoon session, while Texan Edwards had finished on top in the morning, completing a strong day for Yamaha, seen as favourites to win Saturday's race.

Despite admitting he was concerned about the new tyre allocation rules, Edwards was encouraged after the first day of official action.

"Today's gone pretty good, I think we can say we've made a strong start to the weekend," said Edwards. "After finding a great setting here at the test we made a few more changes in Jerez and made the bike even better.

"We started off today with the bike set-up pretty similar to Jerez, with just a few small changes, and it seemed to work well from the off. We had a little bit of an issue this morning with a tyre, but we compared notes with Valentino afterwards and sorted that out pretty quickly between us.

"It's the first day of the new tyre rules and it's a little bit scary to know that there's no longer an inexhaustible supply, but we just have to slightly adapt the way we work to accommodate it and I think it will work well in the long run.

"Here it could be more of an issue because the conditions can be quite changeable from day to day, but we'll keep our fingers crossed that we stay in the 'range' and save one of each of our best tyres for race day."