MotoGP: Rossi quickest as rain spoils session

Valentino Rossi emerged fastest as poor weather at Assen resulted in a shortage of action in third MotoGP practice.

Pre-session rain created tricky track conditions, leading to an uneventful first half in which riders were reluctant to explore 'The Cathedral'.

It was left to Alvaro Bautista to provide any form of entertainment as the Gresini Honda rider was the first to go out on slicks with 15 minutes of the session remaining.

His aim was to try to improve on his Thursday best time of 1m34.466s by 0.007 seconds to gain automatic promotion to Q2, but the medium compound rear tyre was clearly not suited to the mixed conditions and the best he could manage was 1m34.912s.

Rossi managed to beat that time by 0.262s during a late flurry of activity in the final few minutes of the session, but no further gains were made by any of the riders and Aleix Espargaro continued to lead the combined timesheet ahead of Marc Marquez.