de Puniet, fastest on Friday, crashed out early in the session and rode his spare bike for much of the allocated hour, before jumping back on his hastily-repaired, primary Ninja ZX-RR to claim fourth place in the very final moments.

"As in the past couple of races, I'd hoped for a better position but I had a small crash early in the session and had to use my second bike for quite a while after that. I had a good feeling from it, although I prefer my other bike," confirmed the Frenchman. "I used two different types of qualifying tyre and one of them didn't work for me at all: it was impossible to finish a lap. The other one was better and I used that on my normal bike at the end, which got me this good lap time. It was so close and I'm just two tenths of a second off pole. We have a good base for tomorrow with the bike, and we've gone very fast on race tyres all weekend, so we should be able to do well."

West, who joined Kawasaki midway through the season, took provisional pole after putting in his best lap time of 2min 2.202secs on his first qualifying tyre. Pole was eventually taken from him with eight-minutes to go, but the 26-year-old maintained a front row spot until the very last lap and is confident for the race.

"It was good to be up the front for most of the qualifying session and I was feeling really comfortable," said Ant. "We used two different types of qualifiers and the two I didn't do so well on are the ones which are usually the best at other circuits. Here, it was the opposite way around. The first one I used was really good but the others barely lasted a lap. I'm actually quite disappointed I didn't stay on the front row but the main thing is I know that with this set up, our race Bridgestones and the good feeling I've got, it's not as if I've only been on the pace for the one lap. So I'm pretty confident and we'll see how it goes tomorrow. Everything's working really well this weekend; it's nice."

Watching tomorrow's race will be the president of Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd, Mr Tadaharu Ohashi, who is currently visiting Malaysia on business, and the president of Kawasaki's Consumer Products and Machinery Company, Mr Shinichi Tamba.