Marlboro Ducati's Casey Stoner is not going to let bits of chipped bone floating around in his wrist distract him from winning the Misano MotoGP round tomorrow, even though he is also experienced shooting pains in his arm too.

The reigning MotoGP world champion set pole by half a second from Yamaha's Valentino Rossi this afternoon. He is riding with a re-opened fracture to the left-hand scaphoid bone and has been given painkillers by Doctor Costa.

"The hand wasn't too much of a problem today although I didn't want to risk working it too hard," said Stoner. There is a bit of bone floating around in there and when my wrist gets into a certain position in some of the corners the nerves get trapped and I get a shooting pain up my arm.

"I can deal with that though and we have an important job to do this weekend. We found a good setting for the bike this morning but it didn't work as well in the higher temperatures this afternoon, so we had to switch back to something else and it worked much better.

"We worked so hard on the race setting that we only had time to use two qualifiers at the end instead of the usual three. With the first one I used a new front, which needed a couple of laps to get scrubbed in, so I came in to change the rear and whilst it was good, it wasn't as good as the first one. So, the lap time could have been better but all in all I'm delighted to be on pole again. It's going to be a long, tough race tomorrow but I'm looking forward to it."