Lorenzo vows to take fight to Rossi

Lorenzo, Rossi and Casey Stoner are all chasing their third win of the season on Saturday, but while the world champion may have taken pole position, Lorenzo, who starts from third on the grid, says he expects to be more competitive in race trim.

"You can see that we have some problems in T4 because on the rest of the track we are fast enough to take the pole position," he said. "But anyway we will try to improve this and for sure tomorrow we will have a lot of pace with the race tyre.

"We are going to fight."

Lorenzo added that while he was disappointed to miss out on pole position, he was satisfied to be starting on the front row of the grid

"I'm happy with the first row, another one for this season, and this is the most important thing with regards to the start of the race tomorrow," he said. "Of course I wanted my fourth pole position but I had some problems in the last sector; I'm not sure why yet.

"We need to continue working to try to improve in that area and to understand the problem, because the race is going to be very hard with quite a few riders up front."