Estoril MotoGP: James Toseland satisfied with eighth

James Toseland kicked off the last part of his MotoGP career with the eighth quickest time in Estoril this afternoon.
Shrugging off the bitter disappointment at losing his Monster Yamaha Tech 3 ride to American WSB sensation Ben Spies, Toseland clocked a best time of 1.38.591 to miss out on a top six by just 0.4s.
The 28-year-old, who will partner Cal Crutchlow in an all-British factory Yamaha World Superbike team in 2010, said: “It was a really good session even though it took a while to get back into the swing of things having spent almost a month off the bike since Misano. The team have worked in a really good direction for the entire session and it was a positive start. There is quite a big difference in the level of grip between the soft and the hard compound options from Bridgestone. We’ll need the harder tyre for the race but with the softer option being so crucial to get a good qualifying position, we need to preserve the softer one as much as we can for tomorrow afternoon. We had a little issue with the stability of the bike under hard braking. This circuit has a lot of high speed braking points but we seemed to have found a much better balance for that. Now it’s a question of making the package we finished the session on more consistent so we can get the maximum grip from the hard tyre.”