Valentino Rossi made a good start to his US Grand Prix weekend today, finishing the day third fastest in the overall standings at Laguna Seca. His best time of 1'22.679 was set this morning and is just over a tenth of a second off last year's lap record.

This morning's first free practice was run in unexpectedly cool temperatures but the Italian's M1 worked well out of the box and he was second fastest, 0.764 seconds of Casey Stoner. Rossi was confident of being able to improve his times this afternoon as the track heated up but the temperature increased by only a few degrees and he was unable to better his time from this morning. He is nonetheless confident that he has not yet reached his full potential here and will be able to make further improvements tomorrow.

Rossi's team-mate Jorge Lorenzo was 13th fastest on what is his first ever ride at this track, whilst the time sheets were topped by Casey Stoner, with Nicky Hayden in second.

Valentino Rossi - Position: 3Time: 1'22.679Laps: 65
"We started quite well this morning and we were quite fast from the start. We used our standard base setting and it seemed to work quite well here, and I think that in fact I could have gone faster this morning but in my last run my grip wasn't perfect so I slowed down. This morning I was quite happy but this afternoon we tried to modify something in the set-up of the bike, because we're still looking for the ideal configuration for this track, and it wasn't as good as we had hoped. Now we must put the best things of each session together and then I believe we will be able to be some tenths faster tomorrow. We have a good potential here and I know we haven't reached it yet; we need to do some work on the suspension but the Bridgestones are good which is encouraging. I am looking forward to making more progress tomorrow and closing the gap to Stoner."

Davide Brivio - Team Manager
"Overall this has been a good day. We are quite pleased with how we started this morning and now we're working hard to fine-tune our set-up, especially the suspension, chassis and electronic mapping, in order to optimise our potential here. It was cooler than we expected today but our Bridgestone tyres are working very well at this track. We didn't improve this afternoon as much as we'd hoped but we will look at the data tonight and continue with our work in the morning."