Italian MotoGP: James Toseland satisfied with third row start

British rider James Toseland declared himself satisfied with eighth place on the grid for tomorrow’s Mugello GP.

This afternoon’s session was the first full dry hour of the weekend after a weather-hit weekend and the Tech 3 Yamaha rider found himself as high as second place with just over 20 minutes remaining when he clocked a 1.49.401.

He eventually finished eighth with a fastest time of 1.49.025 and he said: “To finish less than a second off pole when you consider all the time we have lost due to the weather is a great result for me.

“I’m relieved to be honest because when it started dry this morning, the dry set-up we had was quite a long way off. It was really hard to ride with that setting and we have changed the bike a lot and gone to a set-up close to what Colin is running. The bike feels a bit more stable now. I think for a tighter track the set-up I had wasn’t going to be too bad.

“But on a fast and flowing track like this it was a little bit nervous so we just changed the front a bit. Now we haven’t got a bad set-up, but I have only had 10 laps on a decent set-up. With the set-up and lack of knowledge of the track, to be a less than a second is not bad.

“Fair play to my team because we did a lot of work and fortunately for me the new set-up is a good direction to go in. This afternoon I only really had 30 minutes to work on the race set-up because you spend 30 minutes on the qualifiers.

“I made some mistakes because on all these new tracks, with the qualifiers you need to be so precise and I haven’t quite mastered exactly where you need to be on the track with them. I’m still not getting the best out of the qualifiers.

“It is such a long lap and I kept coming out of a couple of corners going slightly wide and then you can forget about the lap time because a small mistake costs you corner speed at the next turn.

“I just suffer a bit of a lack of track knowledge but the bike and the tyres are working great. I just need to get a good start because the slipstream here can really help you get a good result.”