Ducati Marlboro Team rider Casey Stoner continued his dazzling form in Portugal today, leading both morning and afternoon practice sessions around the tortuous and bumpy Estoril circuit. World Championship leader Stoner, who has topped practice and qualifying at the last four MotoGP events and won the last three races, worked with his usual precision to achieve an impressive pace, his best run averaging low 1m 38s. His closest rival today was Makoto Tamada who used a qualifying tyre to get within 0.039 seconds of Stoner, who used race tyres throughout the day.

Casey Stoner - Ducati Marlboro
We're reasonably happy with the way today went, we struggled a little bit this morning and also a little bit in the last part of this afternoon's session but apart fro that we're very happy with the settings we've got for this track, which is one of the most difficult circuits of the year with a lot bumps and some very technical corners. We've nearly done race distance on the tyres, so everything is thing going very well, we just need to try and improve the traction for tomorrow. If we can do that then we should be able to push to improve our lap times and also our pace for the race.

Valentino Rossi - Fiat Yamaha
Today I am quite happy because we've made some improvements to the new engine and it's going well for us, plus the new tyres that we found at the last test are also working quite well. We have a few small problems to fix, but I was able to ride a lot better today; I was quite fast from the start and we did some good work to find the right setting. Also this afternoon Tamada used a qualifying tyre so in reality we were second fastest on race tyres and quite close to Stoner; this is a good result. The bike is not so bad and it feels like we've made a good step forward. At the moment we need to think about the second part of the race, because this is where we expect more problems, but tomorrow the condition of the asphalt should be improved so hopefully this will also help our tyre performance.

Randy de Puniet - Kawasaki Racing
I've been happy with the bike since this morning, when we immediately found a good setting. In the first session, I did 24 laps with the same rear tyre and my times were very good. I tried a harder compound but was sliding a bit so I went back to the first one. I didn't realise my rib was broken until I got it checked out last week and, this morning, it was a bit painful to move on the bike; I was much more confident this afternoon after it had subsided a bit. We'll try to improve the ZX-RR a little for Saturday but it's already very good for the race. We just need to perfect some little bits.

John Hopkins - Rizla Suzuki
Going into this morning was all about working our way through our tyre allocation with Bridgestone and getting the best results for the cooler conditions. We changed some gearbox and suspension settings because the set-up for this track is not as easy as it has been at some of the circuits recently. But we've got our heads down and Stuart and the crew have done a good job in finding what we need. This afternoon we had a couple of minor mechanical glitches, but we got them all sorted out by the end and we're confident about what we can do tomorrow. If we can continue from how we ended this afternoon's session we will make some serious improvements tomorrow!

Nicky Hayden - Repsol Honda
This was a pretty routine Friday for us. The position is obviously down a little bit from where we would like to be, and half a second is quite a lot, but time-wise it's not as far back as we've been at some tracks on Friday. We made a good step from the morning to the afternoon session and I've got a few clear ideas on direction for the machine set-up, so that's encouraging. I need to improve in T3 - that's my biggest problem area at the moment - but overall we've made some good progress today. The track conditions were pretty perfect in both sessions and the surface wasn't too dirty to start with this morning. That little flip-flop chicane is probably the trickiest part of this track so we need to make sure we're getting through there a little better tomorrow.

Free Practice Results (Combined FP1 and FP2):