Stoner, who made his testing debut with Ducati almost exactly one year ago, finished Friday just 0.116 seconds quicker than closest-challenger
Sylvain Guintoli, but the Frenchman used qualifying tyres to achieve his best time while Stoner stuck to race tyres.
"Everything seems to be going pretty well again," said ten-times 2007 race winner Stoner. "We tried a lot of different settings this afternoon to try and make the harder compound rear tyres work, because the conditions are a bit colder than we expected. The tyres we have prefer to work in slightly hotter temperatures, so we're going to have to make them work a bit harder.
"A lot of times today we had new tyres on but the setting wasn't quite right so we weren't able to do good lap times, then we'd improve the setting using old tyres and we were able to go very fast. We just need a little bit more work on the set-up and we should be able to get pretty close," confirmed the confident young Australian.
As so often this season, team-mate
Loris Capirossi was unable to replicate Stoner's pace - the Italian setting the 14th quickest time, 1.032 seconds off his team-mate's best, at the start of his final weekend with Ducati.
"We are working hard, trying to get better rear traction," explained the 2008 Suzuki rider. "We have three types of rear tyre, all a bit too hard for what I need, so we will probably adjust the set-up to put more weight on the rear. Last year we found a good set-up here but the bikes are very different now - you use the edge of the tyres a lot more with the 800s and this can make things difficult for my riding style. Anyway, we will see what we can do with the set-up, and if we do find more traction it should be easy to go five or six tenths faster."
