Nicky Hayden went well today with sixth best time in qualifying, only half a second off pole. After yesterday’s rain-lashed first day of practice there was further rainfall this morning, so qualifying was the first fully dry session of the weekend. Race tyre selection will thus be a more than usually complicated affair, with Repsol Honda engineers working closely with Michelin technicians to choose the best tyres for tomorrow’s race. Despite the lack of dry-track time the pace was red hot, with pole position eight tenths faster than the previous best Mugello pole, set by a 990cc MotoGP bike in 2006.

Nicky Hayden, 6th fastest, 1m 48.666s

“We’ve basically only had one completely dry session all weekend – so we’ve tried out a lot of tyres: rains, intermediates and qualifiers and just a couple of race tyres. So that’s certainly a big issue for tomorrow, we don’t know a lot about what race tyres to run, so we’ll definitely let Michelin help us a little there. We made a bit of progress this afternoon and ended up on the second row. I’m not going to fool myself though, it’s certainly going to be a hard one tomorrow, some guys going really quick. It’d be nice to improve in warm-up, we’ve got some work to do to try and get closer to the front. Then we’ll just try to get a start and go for it.”