Any surprises today?

Perhaps only Shakey Byrne in front of Hodgeson. Then there's a good
showing by KrJr on the Suzuki. And Nakano on the Kawasaki. And Bayliss
apparently having trouble coming to terms with the new Ducati.

Otherwise it looks like business as usual.

Forecast is for rain tomorrow and dry on Sunday, so we may well see
Rossi on pole for the race.

Watching Rossi closely, he was riding as hard as he appeared to last
year with the same amount of raggedness. In terms of style, it was a bit
loose on the entry to corners and some gentle sliding on the exits.
Pretty much exactly what we saw him do on the Honda.

There was a great TV shot of Edwards debriefing with his mechanics. Lots
of graphic hand gestures and ahem, forthright comments. I get the
feeling he could do with some more setup time.

Biaggi was fast and smooth as usual and Sete pulled at least one lap out
of the bag.

But Rossi was fast all day. Damn, it's hard to bet against him.

One last thought. Lots of people had fast laps with one bad sector. I
think these bikes are now so hard to ride that it's really easy to make
one mistake and lose 0.5s. Even though the final results were close with
the first 9 covered by one second, very few of them managed more than
one or two perfect fast laps.