Vermeulen upbeat after Le Mans practice

The Australian, who won his maiden MotoGP race at the French circuit last year, was a strong fifth quickest overall - and bullish that there is still plenty more to come from his GSV-R bike.

"Le Mans is a special track for me after my first Grand Prix win here last year," said Vermeulen. "I have great memories and I'm really looking forward to this weekend.

"I think we have got the base settings about right, we progressed a lot in China - despite our misfortune in the race - and we learnt quite a bit about the GSV-R. The bike has worked really well here from the beginning and although we made a few modifications we are really pleased with where we are at the moment.

"We tried a number of tyres from our allocation and things seem to be quite positive on that side as well. I still think we have some room for improvement tomorrow. We'll try a few more things and hopefully move up the order."

Although Vermeulen's teammate Loris Capirossi could not quite match his pace, the Italian is confident he will improve on Saturday.

"I struggled a bit too much with the bike today and I never found a good set-up, but we have a good setting in the team already because Chris went much better than me and we will look at his data and see if it can help us tomorrow," he explained.

"We still need to get some more control out of the bike and we will try a couple of different things on Saturday. I am quite happy with the performance of the tyres, so we just need to sort out a couple of other things and I'm sure we'll be up with the front guys.

"We have to keep working hard and I need to improve a lot in sections three and four as I'm really slow through there, but I know what is needed and I will be going for it tomorrow."