Rossi to make a race of it?

Stoner needs to score 15 points more than Rossi on Sunday, the difference between first and sixth place, to wrap up his first world crown four rounds early.

However, the Italian was a close third fastest on Friday at Estoril - just 0.17secs behind Stoner, with Makoto Tamada using a Dunlop qualifying tyre to split the pair. After three Stoner start-to-finish wins in a row, Rossi finally looks capable of racing with the Australian once again.

"Today I am quite happy because we've made some improvements to the new engine and it's going well for us, plus the new tyres that we found at the last test are also working quite well," declared Valentino. "We have a few small problems to fix, but I was able to ride a lot better today; I was quite fast from the start and we did some good work to find the right setting. Also this afternoon Tamada used a qualifying tyre so in reality we were second fastest on race tyres and quite close to Stoner; this is a good result. The bike is not so bad and it feels like we've made a good step forward. At the moment we need to think about the second part of the race, because this is where we expect more problems, but tomorrow the condition of the asphalt should be improved so hopefully this will also help our tyre performance."

"Today was positive for Valentino but more difficult for Colin," added team director Davide Brivio. "With Valentino we're continuing to use the new engine, we have found some positive things with it and it's working well. Plus the new tyres we have here are an improvement for us. We can see that Valentino is already able to ride quite well and his pace is close to the top so we will keep working in the same direction. With Colin we have some more work to do and we have to check very carefully tonight the information we gathered today in order to find a better set-up for him tomorrow. We know he can improve because this morning he was quite fast, so we need to go back in that direction tomorrow."

Rossi's Fiat Yamaha team-mate Colin Edwards was the only rider to lap slower in the afternoon session, leaving him 13th overall as a result.