MotoGP news

Rossi satisfied with front row

Fiat Yamaha Team rider Valentino Rossi took his fifth front row start of the 2008 season at Assen today, ahead of tomorrow's 60th Dutch TT. The Italian missed out on pole by just 0.139 seconds and will share the front row with Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa, his closest championship rivals.

The bright sunshine of yesterday gave way to bad weather this morning and the first session was run on a wet track, with Rossi finishing seventh. The sun came out after lunch and the track was dry for qualifying, giving the team some time to continue with yesterday's work and refine their dry set-up.
During the last third of the session Rossi was able to improve with each of his Bridgestone qualifying tyres and looked to be in with a chance of pole on his final flying lap, when a small problem in the final sector lost him his advantage. Second place behind Stoner looked secure until a last-minute dash from Pedrosa relegated him to the outside of the front row, with his team-mate Jorge Lorenzo two rows behind him in seventh.

Speaking about his qualifying session Rossi said: "Like always, the front row is our target and so we are happy with this third position. Anyway it's better than last year, when I was 11th! We made some small modifications with the qualifying tyre and today everything seemed to work very well. Now we hope that it will translate to the race tyre, although of course we have to wait and see what the weather is like before we can make a choice, things change so quickly here!

"I was able to try for pole and I thought it was possible on the last lap, but unfortunately I had a small problem with the last tyre. Today we were all very close, closer than yesterday, but I think we still need to improve a bit more if we're going to be sure to be able to fight with Casey, so we will try to finalise things tomorrow morning."

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