Progress for Ducati Team during qualifying in Portugal

The Italian finished the day ninth-quickest, with his American teammate one position back, and while neither rider is enthusiastic with his grid spot, the session marked a step forward for the team in terms of gap to the front.

Rain threatened qualifying, which was briefly interrupted by an unrelated red flag, but in the end both sessions took place on a dry track, giving the Ducati Team valuable time to experiment with settings before focusing on posting a fast time. During tomorrow’s morning warm-up session, Rossi will try to improve acceleration, while Hayden will hunt for better tyre grip.

Valentino Rossi (Ducati Team) 9th (1:38.059)

"The day wasn’t bad in the end. We’re on the third row, 0.8 seconds behind pole position, and we’re matching the pace of the intermediate group, after the top four. We’ve worked better this weekend, steadily making small improvements, and now I’m able to ride closer to the limit and push harder on the bike. We have a lot of work to do, especially on acceleration, where we’re losing time, but for sure it’s our best session so far. Tyres will be important, because the soft is difficult to manage to the end, whereas with the hard, it’s very difficult to push in the beginning. We're leaning toward the soft, but we'll wait for tomorrow to decide."

Nicky Hayden (Ducati Team) 10th (1:38.253)

"Obviously, this isn’t where we wanted to be. I’m one second from the top, which sometimes isn’t that far off, but here I’m in tenth place. All weekend, we just haven’t been able to find that last little bit, as I’ve had a lot of little problems. For whatever reason, we’re not getting the bike to work the tyre properly, and it’s not really gripping the track. I used the same hard tyre the entire morning session, so I thought I'd take more of a step in qualifying. Some of my used tyres still look like new, but they’re just spinning. On a positive note, I went much faster than I did here last year in qualifying."