Stoner frustrated by qualifying result

The new world champion had dominated practice, but admitted he had misjudged the weather conditions in qualifying - which was the first session of the event not affected by rain.

"Qualifying has so far been probably the worst session for us in our whole weekend," Stoner said.

"We went out quite early with a qualifying tyre because every other session had been interrupted by rain so we thought we'd get a decent qualifying lap in before the rain started. But the rain never came so I think it wasn't the best idea to do that.

"Then we only had one qualifying tyre for the end of the session. We knew we could go about a second faster than we did on our first tyre, because I got held up on my first lap.

"Unfortunately I got held up on my second lap, plus I made a small mistake, and we just weren't anywhere near the pace."

Stoner ended up 0.615 seconds slower than pole position man Dani Pedrosa, with Valentino Rossi starting between them on the front row.

Until qualifying Stoner had been in imperious form in Australia. He had been fastest by over a second in the first session of the weekend, before topping Friday afternoon and Saturday morning practice despite suffering accidents in both.

But despite his frustration about the qualifying result, Stoner remained confident that he would be strong in the race.

"Looking at the race tomorrow, I think we've got a pretty good setting at the moment," he said.

"We're running hard tyres, I think everybody is this weekend, and everything's looking quite good for us."