'Bee in boot' but Edwards ahead of Rossi.

A bee in his boot caused a brief, unpleasant, interruption - but otherwise Colin Edwards was a happy man after setting the fourth fastest time during Friday practice at Le Mans.

With the Bugatti circuit boasting a longest straight of only 450m, and being the home event of Fiat Yamaha's tyre supplier Michelin, much is expected of the factory M1s this weekend.

The duo got their French challenge off to a positive start this morning with Valentino Rossi finishing the first free practice second fastest and Edwards just 0.3secs off his team-mate in seventh.

However, only Edwards excelled this afternoon, finishing as the top non-Honda and just 0.3secs from fastest man Marco Melandri, while Rossi failed to improve on his morning time and slipped to seventh as a result.

"I think we've made a good start here today," confirmed Colin. "We made some small adjustments to the bike setting and generally stiffened it up a bit in order to make it a little bit more responsive at this track and it seems to have worked. The bike's definitely feeling pretty good at the end of day one.

"I had a bit of a problem this afternoon when a bee somehow flew into my boot!" revealed the Texan, who was seen waving his leg along the home straight. "I'd literally just passed the entrance to pit lane when I realised so I had to get round a whole lap with it in there. It stung me a couple of times in my foot but I think I'll survive...!"

However, the new tyre rules - which limit the number of tyres that can be used during the weekend and which must be chosen before first free practice - are causing less easily solved problems for Edwards, and especially Rossi.

"The tyre rules are once again making things a little difficult; we've found a good tyre which we added onto our selection at the last minute last night and I think I did my best lap on that this afternoon after quite a lot of laps," said Colin.

"This morning things were going okay but this afternoon we ran into a few problems and we weren't able to improve our situation much," admitted Rossi. "The tyre rule isn't great for us here and we haven't yet found the right tyre from our selection, however we've gathered a lot of data today so hopefully we can make some changes tomorrow to get our package working better.

"I think that we didn't find exactly the right direction today with regards to the setting; this is quite a strange track and at the moment I can't ride the bike how I want to. I have a big score to settle here after what happened last year [when Rossi broke down while leading] so we've got to keep focused and work at 100% in order to be in the best shape for a battle on Sunday. We need to close the gap to the others tomorrow. Colin is a bit faster than me and he showed the bike is working quite well, so hopefully we can study the data we have and come up with a new direction for tomorrow."

"We've definitely got some work to do!" confessed team director Davide Brivio. "The situation for Colin is better than for Valentino and he has found a tyre that's working okay for him, but there's definitely a little way to go yet for both riders."