Dani Pedrosa, victorious at Indianapolis last week, demonstrated his pace-setting skills again on Friday when he clocked the fastest time in practice for Sunday's San Marino Grand Prix.

The Honda rider clocked 1min 34.772sec to edge out stablemate Andrea Dovizioso by 0.612sec, with Yamaha pair Jorge Lorenzo, the championship leader, and Valentino Rossi, the defending world champion, filling the top four.

"It's been a really good start here in Misano compared to last year and I'm very happy about that," said the 24-year-old, whose win at the US Grand Prix last Sunday was his third of the season.

"We are coming from a strong result at the last race and it's important to keep the momentum going, which we have done so far.

"But we need to remain very concentrated and focused because we still have some areas to improve, and I'm sure our rivals will also go quicker tomorrow."

Pedrosa was third here last year and on Sunday will be chasing his first back-to-back wins in MotoGP.

Lorenzo has a 68-point lead in the title race over Pedrosa and has finished on the podium in every race this season, but the Spaniard admitted that he was not happy with his performance on Friday.

"Today was quite difficult for us, more so than we expected," said Lorenzo.

"It's not my physical condition, I feel completely recovered from the hard weekend in Indianapolis, but we really struggled today and I didn't have enough confidence in my bike or in the tyres."

Rossi, chasing a third sucessive win at his home event, was happy with his fourth-place despite being 0.767sec off the lead.

"We're quite far from Pedrosa, who was very impressive today, but we're close to Dovizioso and Lorenzo. Tomorrow we will try to find some tenths and improve our time a bit," said the Italian.