Rossi predicts 'hard battle' in China

Rossi is happy with the handling of his Yamaha M1 but is well aware that the competitiveness of the field makes it vital that the team extract every bit of performance they can from the machine.

"I'm not so happy with sixth position but the difference from the top is very small, only 0.18 seconds, and so the actual time is not so bad," said Rossi. "All the riders are very close and already you can see that it's going to be a hard battle.

"For this reason we have to find every millimetre of difference in every corner of the track in order to have an advantage. And it's also going to be important to start from the front.

"We're working hard to get the bike in the best possible shape but I can already ride my M1 quite well. We are missing a little bit of top speed on the straight but we're obviously making it up in other areas of the track where our bike is strong, because our overall times are similar to our rivals."

Fiat Yamaha teammate Colin Edwards began evaluation of an engine upgrade in second practice, but feels he needs more laps under his belt to get a true gauge of how much of an improvement it will be.

"I've got a small engine modification to try here but actually I only managed a few laps with it at the end of the second session today," said the American. "Tomorrow we'll use it a bit more and see how we get on with that.

"Anyway my time wasn't too bad today; it's ridiculously close amongst the top group so it looks like we could see some pretty exciting racing this weekend.

"I feel pretty good overall - we made a small modification to the geometry this afternoon and that's improved things a bit and we've got a couple more ideas just to finally tweak the setting a little more tomorrow."