Rossi delighted with last gasp pole

Having dominated much of the weekend so far, Rossi was caught in traffic at the end of qualifying and slipped back to fourth on the provisional grid behind Dani Pedrosa, Jorge Lorenzo and Toni Elias.

He then emerged from the pits with just enough time to complete another run and managed to snatch pole back again by two tenths of a second.

"This is a nice pole because not only it is important, but with 3m10s to the end I was stuck in traffic," Rossi told Italia1.

"I caught up with [Chris] Vermeulen who was going slow, and then there were the usual Elias, [Alex] de Angelis, etc who were waiting for me, so I made the extreme gesture of pitting to change tyres, but I didn't know if I could do it in time.

"I pushed hard on the out-lap and I had already good grip. So I managed to do a great lap with time running out. We're ahead - it's an important pole for tomorrow's race."

Before the weekend Rossi was sceptical about his prospects of winning the race, insisting that Pedrosa and Lorenzo were likely to be faster than him at Misano. But having been quickest in both practice hours as well as qualifying, he is now much more confident.

"We've always been competitive in every session," Rossi said. "We should be quite in good shape for the race."