Despite getting to within 0.032secs of
Casey Stoner and pole position for Saturday's Dutch TT,
Dani Pedrosa is acutely aware that the Australian holds a performance advantage over the field - and will try to break away early in the race.
"I'm very happy with this afternoon's result, especially because this will be the first time I've started from the front row in
MotoGP at Assen," began Pedrosa, whose pushed world championship leader
Valentino Rossi to third on the grid.
"The first part of the track is very tight, so it is really important to start from the front row here. Casey will try to escape from the pack at the start, which means it will be crucial to get a good start and try to stay in contact," warned the Repsol Honda rider, who will start round nine of 18 eleven points behind Rossi.
Team-mate and 2006 Assen winner team-mate
Nicky Hayden will start the event form fourth position. Hayden, using the pneumatic-valve RCV engine for the second race, might have done even better if he had had time to use his final qualifying tyre.
"This afternoon seemed to go so quick," said Nicky. "We tried a couple of little things on the front, but after the first run we had to go back to what we had before because the changes helped in some areas but overall they made it worse.
"We started putting our qualifiers and then I had an issue with the clutch which lost us some time in the tyre changes, so ultimately I didn't get to use my last qualifier, so we had one bullet left in the chamber that we didn't use.
"The Michelin qualifiers were working awesome round here, every one we put in I kept getting faster, so it would've been fun to fire the last one in there. It's going to be a hard race tomorrow, I'm not making no predictions, we'll see what we can do, go for the best result we can," he added.
