Stoner: I could have gone faster

The world champion smashed the previous pole record at the Dutch track as he lapped in 1:35.520 to beat Dani Pedrosa and Valentino Rossi to the top spot, but was not happy with his time, feeling that the windy weather had slowed him significantly.

"Unfortunately it was a lot windier this afternoon and we had the rain this morning, so it was kind of medium conditions," he said.

"With the wind this afternoon it was really pushing in the corners where we have to rely on the front particularly, so that was making things ten times more difficult than they should be - especially with the qualifying tyres, when I was putting more pressure again on the fronts I was losing a lot of time."

Stoner was also frustrated by some minor technical issues on his Ducati, although he believes the work done in practice on Thursday - when he was dominant - will stand him in good stead for the race despite today's problems.

"Other than that, we had another problem with the dashboard and the lap time wasn't coming up, so I don't know what was going on there," he said.

"We also had another small problem so I didn't get a lot of laps on race tyres, but we did enough yesterday to know what was going on."

The Assen pole position is Stoner's second consecutive pole after he also dominated both qualifying and the race at Donington Park a week ago.