EDWARDS LOOKS FOR BEST RESULT OF YEAR

COLIN Edwards had a productive day at Phillip Island on Saturday, the 36-year-old in good form in the morning to register the second fastest time behind home crowd favourite Casey Stoner.

Edwards was able to comfortably lap inside the top ten during qualifying before modifications to improve turning performance enabled him to drastically drop his lap times.

The changes saw Edwards immediately go half a second faster, a 1m 31.521s lap moving him from eighth to fourth with eight minutes remaining. He knocked a further tenth off on his next lap and looked like claiming his best qualifying result of the season - until Marco Simoncelli dropped him back to fifth in the closing minutes. Edward's best time of was less than a tenth of a second behind team-mate Ben Spies.

"It was almost my best qualifying result of the season but I'm happy with fifth and being so close to Ben on the front row gives me a lot of confidence for the race. I have felt really good on the bike today and finishing second on Saturday morning gave me a lot of confidence. I had a fairly good set-up with the bike but I was just missing a little bit of turning performance. We left the bike for the start of qualifying and I was basically doing the same lap times as the morning. So we made some changes to the front for my last rear tyre and immediately I was able to go half-a-second faster. It just felt easy and I gained so much confidence that I could put the bike where I wanted it to be on the track. I'm happy with my race pace and I'm ready, so hopefully I can get my best result of the year. We'll have to see what the weather throws at us but I'm ready for anything."