Hopkins confident of progress

The Kawasaki rider finished down in 12th position as he struggled with the handing of his bike out of the hairpins.

Hopkins admitted, however, that the new engine the team are using this weekend is a step forward and the Anglo-American believes he will have a stronger Saturday.

"There wasn't much we could do this morning in the wet, especially as the rest of the weekend is predicted to be dry, so we just refined our wet weather set-up," said Hopkins.

"This afternoon the track was still damp in places, but we went out on slick tyres and evaluated all of our different Bridgestone tyre options to find something suitable for the race.

"We also had a revised specification engine to use and although it's not that different to what we had before, I can already feel that it's quite a bit smoother. The main area we are concentrating on is making improvements to our chassis setting as I'm struggling at a few of the hairpin corners to get the bike to turn and exit comfortably.

"However, we set our fastest time right at the end of the session on a tyre that had already done a lot of laps, which is positive. We'll make a few changes overnight and we're not that far off the rest of the field, so I'm feeling confident that we can work our way up the timesheets in qualifying."

Teammate Anthony West said he was also having problems with his bike's handling, especially with traction at the exit of the corners.

The Australian was 17th quickest.

"Conditions at the circuit have been far from ideal today as this morning was wet, but it didn't really dry out totally for the afternoon session," said West. "This inconsistency in weather is not making our job any easier, and we need to make some big improvements to move ourselves further up the standings.

"We're struggling to get the machine into the turns, and we're also suffering with a lack of rear traction on corner exit. It felt slippery out on track, and although we've made quite a lot of changes to the chassis set-up, we haven't really found anything that's made a big enough difference to improve our lap time significantly.

"We will continue to work overnight with the data we now have and hopefully we can make more of an impression tomorrow."