“There are a lot of positives from this weekend and pole position was one of them, though certainly fourth wasn’t quite the result we hoped for. We knew it was going to be tough today and the first lap wasn’t so kind to me – but actually I was just happy to get through the first lap after what happened at the last race.

In the beginning I wasn’t quite able to get into a rhythm, I was really struggling out of Turn six and some riders were able to get up the inside of me into Turn seven. I was duking it out with Melandri which lost me some time and then I found a rhythm, got down into the 1m 37s laps and caught up to Stoner. I was riding right on the edge and used up a lot of my tyres to try to catch the leaders, and then I made one big mistake which cost me a lot of time.

My bike ran really well today. The engine was good and the Michelin tyres worked well so I really don’t have a lot of excuses – those guys were just a little bit quicker and I give them credit. This was my first pole position of the year and I had the fastest lap of the race which is definitely positive. We’re way better off than we were a few months ago so things feel like they’re back on track and I’m enjoying riding the bike again. So, we’ll go to Motegi and try to keep it rolling. We’ve got four more cracks at it!”