Pedrosa hindered by practice crash

The world championship leader was fourth in the earlier session this morning, but dropped his Honda at Turn 12 in the early stages of the afternoon session and had to complete the session on his spare bike.

"This morning we started out working on set-up and tyre choice, as usual," said Pedrosa. "I had a good feeling and the tyres were working well, but in the afternoon I crashed, maybe I braked too late.

"But it was without any real consequence, except that I couldn't find the same feeling with the second bike so I couldn't go as fast as I wanted.

"Tomorrow we will try to improve our settings and do some longer runs on the tyres. We have to see how how it will be because the track temperature can get very hot here. It was already more than 40 degrees this afternoon."

Pedrosa's Repsol Honda teammate Nicky Hayden was also unsatisfied by what he called an "average" day after finishing both practice sessions in eighth place.

"Today was pretty average, really, I certainly hoped to be nearer the top," he admitted. "We made some little improvements this afternoon, got the bike to steer a bit better, and dropped the lap time a bit which helped, but we're still down in eighth. It's a short lap here so a couple of tenths is a lot.

"We've got a couple of ideas to improve tomorrow, but it's not easy to figure out how we're going to get down to where we need to be, we need to find a big chunk from somewhere.

"In the past I've had some good results here but it's a track where I always struggle a bit on the first day and then pull it together, so let's see if we can do the same this year."