The Repsol Honda rider, the leading Michelin competitor all weekend, had expected a significant fall in pace towards the end of the race - and so pushed as hard as he could at the beginning to try and overtake Casey Stoner.

"I pushed very hard at the beginning because from what we'd seen in practice I was expecting the grip level from the tyres to fall away towards the end of the race," he said. "My plan was to make a gap if possible and handle the grip situation as well as I could. For the first few laps I was quite consistent behind Casey but when I started to brake later with a full tank of fuel I was losing the front end, so I dropped back a little and that's when Marco [Melandri} passed me."

Fortunately for Pedrosa, the predicted loss of tyre performance never came and he was able to stick with the two leading Bridgestone riders right to the finish - although a second victory of the season remained out of reach.

"As the race went on and the fuel load came down, I began to get a better feeling at the front of the machine under braking. I was really surprised about the high pace in the final part of the race because we didn't expect to maintain these lap times based on what we'd seen in practice. So I must say thank you to Michelin because we were able to get on the podium today thanks to the consistency of the tyre performance," declared the 22-year-old.

Sepang marked Pedrosa's seventh podium of the season and closes the gap to Valentino Rossi in second place in the world championship to 24 points with one race, and 25 points, still remaining.

"Dani rode at the absolute maximum today and I'd like to thank him for this," said team manager Makoto Tanaka. "However, we couldn't quite close the performance gap to our rivals and so the end result is of course a little disappointing for us after another pole position."