Contrasting form continues for Stoner and Melandri

As well as setting an impressive race pace once again on Friday morning the World Champion Casey Stoner improved his best lap on each of his three qualifying tyres in the afternoon run to secure his third consecutive pole start.

During his last run on race tyres Stoner could not see his lap times on his dash and they did not show up on the circuit monitors but the problem was quickly solved, and he came out on top against Championship rivals Dani Pedrosa and Valentino Rossi.

In contrast Marco Melandri was unable to improve his recent form he will start the A-Style TT Assen from seventeenth on the grid.

Casey Stoner - Pole

`This afternoon was a lot windier than yesterday and the rain this morning meant that the track conditions weren´t at their optimum: the front was pushing in a lot of corners where you really have to rely on it, so that made life ten times more difficult than it should be! Before we put the qualifiers in we had that problem with the lap time transmitter and I didn´t know how fast I was going. Luckily Dorna managed to fix it before we put the qualifying tyres in and I was feeling confident, but the extra grip offered by the softer rear put even more pressure on the front and I almost lost it on several occasions during the last three laps. To have qualified on pole despite all those things is fantastic! The rain this morning also meant that we didn´t get many laps in on slick race tyres today but that is the same situation for everybody and we did enough yesterday to be confident about tomorrow´s race.´

Marco Melandri - Seventeenth

`I don´t know what to say, other than that I am extremely disappointed to be in a position that doesn´t correspond to my ability, or clearly that of the bike. We´re all trying so hard but we just can´t find a solution to our problems and it´s going to be a very tough race tomorrow.´