Toseland finishes 15th fastest in the session, a mighty 1.222 seconds slower than Pedrosa. He's run only 21 laps, while Pedrosa,
Loris Capirossi on the Rizla Suzuki and
Shinya Nakano on the Gresini Honda have peaked with 28.
But there's nothing that can be done about it except to hope that the antibiotics might clear up the chest problem. "Tomorrow's another day," Burnett reflects as we climb back on the scooter. "If anybody can come back from this it's James, he's that tough."
Saturday am - Puig: 'You Don't Need Pneumatics to Win'
I start the day with a breakfast-time catch-up with Alberto Puig, who says categorically: "You don't need a pneumatic-valve engine to win this championship."
Now that's a pretty forthright opinion when everyone is rushing down the pneumatics route in
MotoGP. But Puig and his protégé
Dani Pedrosa have always taken a pragmatic approach to the art of motorcycle racing. They work at understanding what they've got and how to maximise its potential, rather than bleating about what they wish they had or what everyone else is running.
"If we can improve on what we have now, we will be happy," Puig says in the back of the Repsol Honda truck.
Pedrosa stunned the paddock by coming from a winter wrecked by injury and a lack of testing to finish third on his valve-spring RCV212V at Qatar, just when it appeared that Honda had run into delays with the introduction of the pneumatic technology.
But Pedrosa isn't fussed by that, and has emerged as a potential race winner here at
Jerez - and a challenger for the championship. "My dream is that Dani can win the 125, 250cc and MotoGP championships," Puig says.
And is he now developing a successor to Pedrosa? He shrugs his shoulders. "I don't know if I have the power to do it again," he says, surprisingly. "With Dani I was completely exhausted. To race with a kid when he was no one, it's not so easy. I had to go around Spain asking for support. Many people said that I was wrong to choose him."
