MotoReview

Marco Melandri

"I am very happy. I have finally rediscovered my feeling with the bike and am enjoying myself again. The test in Qatar allowed us to find a good base to work from which has really helped us. I like the Turkish circuit and feel comfortable here although there is still room for us to improve. I have found a good rhythm but still have to improve on coming out of the corners where I'm lacking a bit of traction. Tomorrow, depending on conditions, we will try some different Michelin tyres with a view to Sunday's race."

Toni Elias

"I am satisfied with our work today. We made some small changes to the set-up we found in Qatar and they worked perfectly. In the morning the track was really dirty and so we made the changes in the afternoon. I had a good rhythm throughout the day and am just 0.39 seconds behind the leading Honda of Nicky Haydem. I hope to learn from the first two races of the season and put in a good showing here."

Colin Edwards

"We started out with the base setting from Qatar but it didn't work very well for us here. Basically we then decided to go with a newer front tyre than the one we've been using in testing and it went much better. Combined with a few tweaks to the suspension I built up my confidence in the front and I was able to lay down some good lap times. In the end we put a pretty consistent run together and I'm happy. We're still getting some vibrations but it's only in a couple of corners and we can work around them with more time on the bike tomorrow; hopefully it will stay dry. The track was really dirty this morning but it started to clean up in the afternoon. If it stays dry then the grip should improve as the weekend goes on, but they're saying it might rain so I guess we'll have to wait and see."

Valentino Rossi

"This morning we were fast straight away and this was quite encouraging. We were third and we thought that we would be able to continue in this way during the afternoon. However we made some modifications in order to improve the acceleration and unfortunately we lost a lot of grip in braking. In fact our lap times were more or less the same in the afternoon but the track was about half a second faster - this morning it was quite dirty - and now we are in 11th place. I am a bit worried but also quite positive because we made some changes at the end of the session, back towards this morning's settings, and we improved a lot and set our fastest lap of the day. So far we don't have any vibration and so we hope that it won't appear tomorrow if the grip improves."