Zoom Valentino Rossi

Fiat Yamaha Team rider Valentino Rossi will start tomorrow's French Grand Prix at the head of the second row, after qualifying fourth in Le Mans this afternoon.

Following on from a tricky afternoon yesterday, today was much better from the start for the 29-year-old Italian and he was second fastest in this morning's free practice session and much happier about his race pace.

This afternoon saw more of the same good work from Rossi as he concentrated on refining set-up and finalising his tyre choice with Bridgestone, before using his three qualifying tyres in the later stages of the session. With his last tyre Rossi was confident of making a run for the front row but he could not quite make it and had to settle for fourth, though he remains confident of being able to play a key part in tomorrow's 28-lap race.

His team-mate Jorge Lorenzo was unfortunate to crash again in practice this morning but escaped any further injury to his damaged ankles and was able to qualify in fifth, next to Rossi. Dani Pedrosa took pole and Tech 3 Yamaha rider Colin Edwards added to Yamaha's impressive 2008 front-row tally by qualifying second, which means that the four Yamaha riders have now filled ten out of the 15 front-row grid spots between them this season.

Valentino Rossi
“Today everything seemed to go very well and I was quite confident; I thought that with the last qualifying tyre I could do 1'32.9 or even 8 and be on the front row, but at the end we had a small problem and couldn't manage this. Of course the first row is always better but with the race tyres we are in good shape, with a strong rhythm and a great set-up. Tomorrow I will look to make a good start, try to get to the front immediately and then try to stay there with the other fast riders. As I said, our race pace is fine but there are four or five other riders with a similar fast pace so it's going to be a very interesting race tomorrow! My target is to be on the podium so now we're hoping for another dry day and then we will do our very best to be there.”

Davide Brivio
“We improved a lot today in comparison to yesterday, now we have a good pace for the race tomorrow and we're going much better all round. We were able to be quite competitive in the qualifying and fourth place is not so bad, so it seems that Valentino is in good shape now for the race. We will have to wait and see now for tomorrow but it's been a positive day and now we will just have to make a few final checks tomorrow morning during warm-up to make sure everything is perfect. We've been waiting for the rain now since Friday so let's just hope that it can hold off for one more day!”

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