Valencia MotoGP: Valentino Rossi frustrated with 10th

Valentino Rossi’s hopes of burying his Valencia jinx were seriously dented today as he slumped to a shock 10th place in qualifying.

Having lost the world title in 2006 in the last race at Valencia to Nicky Hayden, Rossi surrendered second in the world championship last season when his factory Yamaha YZR-M1 broke down.

But his bad run continued today, with the 29-year-old only posting a best time of 1.32.962 as he failed to make any significant progress with the set up of his Fiat Yamaha.

Rossi said: “Today was the hardest qualifying of the season and we had a lot of problems. I was very fast in the wet and we had a good setting and I would be confident tomorrow if it is wet. But if it is dry we have to improve a lot because we are not that fast.

“I am not able to turn and I lose a lot of time in acceleration. My situation is quite difficult for tomorrow because we have to improve our pace and we have to start from the fourth row, which will make it a difficult race.

“I’m confident we can make the bike better because we understand the problems we had today and we have to try and fix them for tomorrow.”

Rossi was the slowest of all of Yamaha’s riders today, but he denied the problem was exclusively related to the performance of his Bridgestone tyres.

The eight-times world champion added: “This track is not fantastic for the M1. Colin (Edwards) and James (Toseland) are quite fast with qualifying tyres but they are very slow with the race tyres, so the Michelin qualifier helps a lot.

“Speaking with Colin and he has some problems. We have to improve because I’m having problems with the M1 in the hairpins where it is difficult to control acceleration on the exit.”

Rossi hopes that weakness will be improved on the 2009 YZR-M1 machine he will test on Monday, with slow corner acceleration one of the key targets of the prototype bike.