Guintoli regrets following Rossi

The Alice Ducati rider, who is taking part in his last MotoGP event before moving to British Superbikes next year, said he spent the first two laps of his last set of qualifying tyres behind the Italian's Fiat Yamaha, without realising the latter was on race tyres in the closing minutes of the session.

By the time he overtook Rossi, Guintoli was able to set his best lap of the session. The Frenchman reckons his tyres would have allowed him to qualify better had he not trailed Rossi for so long.

"When I was using my last set of soft tyres I was behind Valentino Rossi and I didn't know he was using race tyres," Guintoli said.

"I lost a couple of laps but then I overtook him and I have obtained my fastest lap time on the third lap with qualifying tyres. Probably, if I had used the tyres in my first lap out of the pit I would have conquered a much better result."

Guintoli suffered a crash in practice yesterday that left his knee bruised and his behind sore.

"It's okay like this for how it went yesterday," he concluded. "I still have a lot of pain in my left knee and tomorrow it will be a very long hard race."

Alice teammate Toni Elias, who will be moving back to the Honda Gresini team after this race, was relieved to have a decent session that saw him qualify in eleventh spot, after struggling to last place yesterday.

"It isn't a great result but I really gave all I had today to conquer the best position possible on the starting grid," said the Spaniard.

"I was in last position and now I am in the middle of the classification which is very important on this track where is very difficult to overtake. It's a pity because we have encountered some difficulties to find a good set up of the bike due to the weather conditions.

"We still have some problems, but this is the situation we are in and we will have to give it all tomorrow to finish in the best way possible the season."