Stoner confident about race chances

The reigning champion moved up to fourth on the grid in the closing moments of the session, and felt he had made huge progress with his Ducati over the course of the hour.

"I'm reasonably confident," Stoner told Italia1 television.

"If you'd asked me at the beginning of the session, I wouldn't have been so confident with the settings that we had, but just before we used the qualifying tyres we found a very good set-up for the race and I feel much more happy with it.

"We had a chance at pole position today but unfortunately some riders got in my way and it was impossible to improve the lap."

With most of practice taking place on a wet track, the early part of qualifying was the teams' first chance to really focus on their dry weather set-ups.

Stoner admitted that Ducati had taken some wrong turns before achieving a set-up that he was very comfortable with.

"We tried some more settings at the beginning of the session and they really weren't working so well," he said.

"In the end we decided to come back to what we had this morning and the bike was working quite smoothly, with much less pumping. In general the chassis feels like it's working quite well around this circuit."