Stoner says he can go faster still

The Australian beat team-mate Dani Pedrosa and Yamaha's Jorge Lorenzo to the top spot despite having traditionally struggled at the Spanish track - but Stoner revealed that Honda would be reverting to its practice setting rather than the one it used for the pole lap.

"This morning I was really happy with the way the bike was working on used tyres. We did more than a race distance and was not too far off my fastest lap time, so we were really happy," he said.

"This afternoon we wanted to continue that, put a lot more laps on a set of hard tyres and see if we could improve it. We didn't seem to be really going in the right direction - every time we seemed to find a bit more grip we'd lose the feeling in the front so we were trying to just find that balance.

"When we put the soft tyre on, we weren't really happy with the way the bike was working, so I think we'll come back to what we had this morning."

The session saw a huge number of crashes, with Stoner himself going off at the first corner on his final lap. He ran straight on into the gravel and allowed the Honda to tip gentle before it could hit the barriers.

"After I did my best lap on one set, we went to the second set and the tyres didn't feel quite as good so I wanted to push the front a little bit harder into corners," Stoner explained.

"I got on the brakes a little too hard, the rear came up and as I let the brakes off I had way too much speed. We were pretty lucky to pull that one up, but we ended up playing in the sandpit a bit."

Although his incident was due to tyre behaviour, he acknowledged that the gusty conditions had been causing most of the problems.

"The conditions have been pretty tough this weekend - from the morning session to the afternoon has really been completely different," said Stoner.

"With the wind picking up it makes things quite difficult and it's making us push the front a little bit more than we'd like to.

"But it's the same conditions for everybody. For the race tomorrow if the wind's going to pick up going towards the afternoon we should see similar conditions, and that's also got the chance of bringing in some rain."