Stoner upbeat on Ducati's chances

The Australian was just a couple of tenths off Valentino Rossi's benchmark time and, although admitting that he still had work to do, he was pretty upbeat about his first day of official action for Ducati.

"We found some reasonably good tyres and straight away we were quicker than in testing a few weeks back, plus the track condition is good, so I'm really happy," said Stoner.

"This morning and this afternoon I only had one set of tyres each session, so I'm quite happy with tyre life and the way they've performed.

"This afternoon we ran into a few little problems with the bike but other than that everything is going quite well. We had to work at getting some traction with the last tyre I used, the front end wasn't turning as well as we'd like it to, so we improved that a little bit towards the end.

"We've still got a fair bit to go through tomorrow, though we've pretty much narrowed rear choice down to two tyres."

Teammate Loris Capirossi ended the day eighth fastest after experimenting with a radical set-up on his Desmosedici GP7 bike.

"We started here with two different chassis set-ups, with very different settings in the rear end," he said. "I first tried one of these solutions at Jerez and I liked it very much, so I am continuing in this direction, though after just two hours of practice it's not yet perfect for this track.

"We use a very hard front here, a specific tyre for this circuit only, and I don't yet feel 100 per cent confident in the tyre, but Casey is using the same front and he's done a lot of laps with it and done some very fast times, so that gives me confidence.

"The bike is working very well in race trim, racing is always different from practicing, so I'm feeling positive about the race."