John Hopkins continued strike of good results by puting his Suzuki to 4th place today, showing some progress made in Rizla-Suzuki garage. Casey Stoner was again quickest Honda rider today, in front of another rider getting back to form: Makoto Tamada. Pair of Ducati riders, Gibernau and Capirossi, ended day in 7th and 8th place. Last weekend race winner, Dani Pedrosa, finished day in 9th, in front of Honda coleague, Marco Melandri. Forecast predicts possible wet qualifying session tomorrow, but it is expected that race at Le Mans should be dry.

Top three rider claims:

Colin Edwards: 1st - 1:35.170
It wasn’t a bad day. We came here off the back of a good result in China, just brought the bike off truck this morning and everything seemed to work pretty well. Valentino is trying to fix a few things with the new chassis so we’re able to focus on working hard towards a race setting and seeing what we can get. I said yesterday that I’d know after four laps what my objective can be for the weekend and now I can say it’s to win.  Why not? Since the test in Turkey we’ve hardly touched the bike and I’ve got a level of confidence and feeling that I know what the bike will do. This morning it worked really well and although the chatter started to come this afternoon when we got more grip, we were still able to push so that’s encouraging. We know this chassis has its limit but we can get it there pretty easily and at this track, where the Yamaha goes well, at least it should allow us to push as hard as anyone else.

Valentino Rossi: 2nd - 1:35.282
I’m happy because both Colin and I are fast from the start and it seems the M1 machine is working very well at this circuit. Now we are in the first and second places so this is a very good result for our team and it gives us some confidence. I was very fast in the morning and in the afternoon we spent the time making some tests for the setting with the new chassis for tomorrow. This job is very important because they say it might rain tomorrow, but we have already found a good base, so I’m very happy about that. I like the new chassis and I think it will help us to go faster. It is much better for the vibration and even at this early stage we can see it has a lot of potential. Yamaha have always gone well at Le Mans so now we wait for tomorrow and see if we can keep it going.

Shinya Nakano: 3rd - 1:35.447
The weather forecast is predicting a dry race on Sunday, but with rain during practice and qualifying tomorrow, so it was important for us to try and identify a race tyre during the dry conditions today. Bridgestone have brought a lot of new tyres to Le Mans, and I think today we tried them all. Every one was very consistent, which is good for us, but I think we will wait to see what the track conditions are like on Sunday before making a firm decision about which tyre to race. I like the changes that they've made to turn one since last year, but then I wasn't a very big fan of the original first turn to be honest. For me the new layout is better, although it has been quite hard to find the best braking point for the new turn one. Overall, the feeling with the bike has been good today, but I think that we can find some improvements through small changes to the chassis and suspension, together with some tweaks to the engine management package. At the moment I'm having to change my riding style and lines through the turns slightly to get the best from the bike, but I think it is possible to improve the situation before the race, as long as we get at least one dry session tomorrow, which I hope will be the case.

Combined FP results:
1 C.EDWARDS 1:35.170
2 V.ROSSI 1:35.282
3 S.NAKANO 1:35.447
4 J.HOPKINS 1:35.461
5 C.STONER 1:35.546
6 M.TAMADA 1:35.625
7 S.GIBERNAU 1:35.628
8 L.CAPIROSSI 1:35.662
9 D.PEDROSA 1:35.796
10 M.MELANDRI 1:35.935
11 N.HAYDEN 1:35.971
12 R.DE PUNIET 1:36.159
13 T.ELIAS 1:36.191
14 C.CHECA 1:36.306
15 K.ROBERTS JR 1:36.483
16 C.VERMEULEN 1:36.904
17 A.HOFMANN 1:37.173
18 J.ELLISON 1:37.986
19 J.CARDOSO 1:38.509