Nakano felt he could've gone faster

Nakano qualified in twelfth position, just under a second and a half slower than fellow Honda rider Dani Pedrosa, and felt he could've got closer if he had ridden a better second half of his lap.

"It's been tough today as the lap time around here has improved a lot!" commented Nakano. "On the qualifying tyre I was making a good lap time in T1 and T2 sectors, but in T3 and the downhill T4 sector we've been having problems with braking stability.

"This makes it hard to enter the corner at high-speed and affects your overall lap-time. Tomorrow we will change some settings to the front of the bike to improve our braking performance. We need to make a good start as at Motegi it's very hard to pass around here."

Team manager Gianluca Montiron agreed with his rider that there was more time to be found, but was still happy with Nakano's performance and is hopeful for a better race tomorrow: "Shinya was quite good today and he made some progress but we needed to make a bigger step forward to move up the grid for the race.

"I think he had a lot of pressure today, as he wanted to have a good qualifying session at this, his home Grand Prix. I think perhaps he didn't use his last qualifying tyre as well as he could have.

"He was behind Valentino Rossi and had posted the fastest first sector of the lap, he lost a little time in T2 and then made a mistake in T3 and lost some more time.

"Tomorrow will be a different story and I think we have to use warm-up to refine the settings that Shinya can use for the race, as we search for improved consistency."