Spain’s Dani Pedrosa kept up his winning form from the Indianapolis Grand Prix as he clinched pole position for Sunday’s race in San Marino.
The Repsol Honda rider, who is second in the championship, set a fastest time of one minute 33.948 seconds, edging out championship leader Jorge Lorenzo.
Casey Stoner, who topped the sheets before a crash, was third and Valentino Rossi fourth fastest for his home race.
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Lorenzo has a 68-point lead over fellow Spaniard Pedrosa in the standings. BBC Sport
World champion Valentino Rossi, riding with a special helmet design featuring a clock on the top - he has different helmets with different times showing, to match the start of each session - will start from fourth place, just a fraction ahead of his 2011 factory Yamaha replacement Ben Spies.
Rossi and Lorenzo kept moving ahead of each other as they prepared for a practice start after the session… Rossi laughed about the incident when he watched it again in the pits.
Spies, who took his first MotoGP pole last weekend, was frequently quicker than anyone for most of the lap, only to lose his advantage in the final part of the lap. Nevertheless, the rookie will start as the leading satellite rider one again.
But only just.
Randy de Puniet returned to the kind of performances he had delivered before his leg-breaking Sachsenring fall with sixth place for LCR Honda, with Spies’ Monster Yamaha tech 3 team-mate Colin Edwards qualifying at the head of row two in seventh.
Pedrosa’s team-mate Andrea Dovizioso will have expected much better than eighth in front of his home fans, while fellow Italians and San Carlo Honda Gresini team-mates Marco Simoncelli and Marco Melandri completed the top ten. Yahoo! Euroosport UK
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