Stoner eyes Le Mans breakthrough

The 2007 world champion's best placing at this track in his previous three MotoGP appearances is a third in his title-winning year. He will start from third on the grid tomorrow.

"We've always done reasonably well here, but just never really where I wanted to be," said the Ducati rider. "Tomorrow we've got probably the best chance I've had at this circuit to get a really good result.

"The bike seems to be working pretty well. Everyone's struggled here to find track time that we really need to get the bike set up well if the race is going to be dry.

"We're pretty happy with the result today and being on the front row."

Stoner, however, felt he could have done better during today's session.

"Qualifying didn't really go as we planned. On my last tyre I thought we should be able to go a little bit faster, but unfortunately I was too close to Chris Vermeulen on the first part of the tyres when they had the best grip, so I pretty much lost my chance.

"I improved my lap time later on, but the tyre was already going downhill."

The 23-year-old Australian, who is second in the standings, 11 points behind Yamaha's Valentino Rossi, feels he should have scored more points so far this season, but is happy the tracks coming up on the calendar are more to his liking.

"In one way we've got to look at the beginning of the season quite badly - we're not scoring the points that we'd hoped to," he said.

"But in another way we're getting all our bogey tracks out of the way, and then we can focus for the rest of the season on tracks we feel more comfortable at."