Stoner disappointed with practice

The Ducati rider, who has already won eight races this season, struggled today on his way to fifth-fastest time. However, he took some comfort from the set-up he used in the morning on the way to second-fastest in that seassion.

"I'm a bit disappointed with today because we couldn't find a good set-up and we just went around in circles," said the young Australian.

"This afternoon we tried something with the chassis but it didn't work and we didn't have enough time to go back to the same settings we had this morning, so we spent a lot of time making a lot of changes and it definitely wasn't a great day.

"To be honest there isn't one area where we have a big problem, we just need to generally improve in a lot of areas, so tomorrow we will start again with the bike settings we had this morning and we will continue working from there in a different direction.

"I'm confident we can improve because this morning's set-up wasn't bad at all".

His teammate Loris Capirossi was happier with his own set-up, only a few hundredth slower than Stoner in today's practice.

"Here we have tried something really different on the set up. I rode four or five laps, one of them behind John [Hopkins], and I was able to be quite fast, even if I had to push really hard.

"Anyway, tomorrow I think we will make a few more little changes and we should have the chance to improve. It's difficult, because I'm still struggling with the power delivery.

"At this track you need a lot of power at low revs and we don't have so much, it's one of our limitations. We are trying to get around this problem by working on the set-up in order to find more torque. We have also made some changes to the gearbox.

"The team is reacting very well, we are trying many things and we hope that we can improve tomorrow."