Gibernau honours Kato with pole

Sete Gibernau offered a fitting tribute to his team-mate Daijiro Kato by taking the pole position at the second round of the MotoGP championship in Welkom, South Africa.

Gibernau continuously improved his times throughout the second qualifying session eventually finishing with a 1:33.174, 1.455 seconds under the circuit lap record.

Three Italians will make up the rest of the front row of the grid with Valentino Rossi bringing his Honda RCV home just 0.016 seconds ahead of rival Honda rider Max Biaggi.

Loris Capirossi got the Ducati Desmosedici on to the front row of the grid for the first time despite destroying his number one bike ten minutes before the end of the session. The Italian rider got on his second bike and managed to up his time to come home with a 1:33.408, beating Sinya Nakano to fourth place by 0.14 seconds.

Carlos Checa managed to improve his performance to take him from his provisional thirteenth place yesterday to a Seventh place start on the grid, just missing out on sixth place to Honda rider Tohru Ukawa.

Colin Edwards finishes the front two rows on his Aprilia coming home just five tenths of a second behind Gibernau.

Times:

1 S.Gibernau 1:33.174 2 V.Rossi 1:33.370 3 M.Biaggi 1:33.386 4 L.Capirossi 1:33.408 5 S.Nakano 1:33.548 6 T.Ukawa 1:33.586 7 C.Checa 1:33.662 8 C.Edwards 1:33.697 9 T.Bayliss 1:33.756 10 A.Barros 1:33.765 11 N.Hayden 1:33.838 12 O.Jacque 1:33.917 13 J.McWilliams 1:33.938 14 N.Abe 1:34.152 15 N.Aoki 1:34.269 16 J.Hopkins 1:34.306 17 K.Roberts 1:34.646 18 M.Tamada 1:34.670 19 N.Haga 1:34.731 20 A.Pitt 1:35.128 21 G.McCoy 1:35.566.

Check back tomorrow to get all the latest news from Welkom plus the results of the World Superbike races in Sugo, Japan.