Factory Yamaha's Ben Spies is confident he can run the soft-compound Bridgestone tyre in tommorrow's Catalan MotoGP race if the temperatures remain the same as they were for qualifying today.

The Texan, who starts at the head of row two, put in his fastest lap this morning on a tyre that had already done 29 laps, or past race distance, on the soft tyre while a lot of teams, including Honda, have concentrated on setup for the hard tyre and only putting in a soft tyre at the end of qualifying.

"This morning was good, it just looks bad on the piece of paper. We were working more on race setup and at the end of the session we had 40 laps on the tyre. The feeling was we should see how the bike would react for tomorrow. The time looked bad but I was comfortable with the bike. We were on a soft tyre from yesterday that already had laps on it and my fastest this morning was on the 30th lap," said Spies, speaking to bikesportnews.com this afternoon.

"We were happy with that and then made some changes for this afternoon, nothing big. On both of my fast laps I made mistakes in the first sector which cost me but we made the time back in the rest of the lap. It would have been nice to put together a full, fast lap then we could have got on the front row but we have a good start position."