Ben Spies admits that Yamaha have some ground to make up to challenge the Hondas of Casey Stoner and Dani Pedrosa for victory at Aragon, but has vowed to do his utmost to at least get a podium after qualifying third.
Spies and team-mate Jorge Lorenzo had to dig deep to reach third and fourth on the Aragon grid as the works Hondas dominated the weekend.
But Spies said he was broadly happy with how his bike was handling, and just felt it was slightly too slow to match the Hondas today.
"I'm happy. The bike's working good," he said.
"There's a gap to the first two, we know that, and between me and Jorge too. But I was happy, I think we got the most out that we could today.
"We were quick on the hard tyre, we were third quickest with a kind of race set-up, and then we put on the soft tyre and we were able to go faster again.
"It seems to be that we've got a good bike. Hopefully we can challenge for the podium in race conditions. We'll just try the best we can."
He was also pleased to be more competitive than he had been at Misano a fortnight ago, when he could only finish sixth.
"I've got to thank the team too - we had a hard weekend at Misano and now we're feeling pretty good here," Spies said.
"We're just lacking a little bit of speed to the front two. We'll try as hard as we can tomorrow and see what we can do."