Marc Marquez finished FP1 outside of the top 10 along with Rossi and as it may have rained in both FP2 and FP3 they were in danger of missing automatic Q2.
But conditions stayed dry during the 45-minute session and it took Marquez two flying laps to beat Dovizioso’s FP1 benchmark, leading by 1: 32.537 minutes.
Only Ducati Wildcard Michele Pirro drove a comparable lap time for most of the time, but the Italian was almost half a second behind the pace.
Marquez stayed in the lead until the last two minutes of the session when he was eventually demoted first by Lorenzo and then by Ducati team-mate of Spaniard Dovizioso.
Dovizioso finished the session with a 1: 32.198s while Lorenzo finished a Ducati 1-2.
Cal Crutchlow (LCR Honda) was narrowly pushed to third by Lorenzo, while Maverick Vinales led Yamaha’s efforts in fourth.
Factory Honda rider Marquez did not improve in the end and fell back to fifth in front of Danilo Petrucci (Pramac Ducati) and Alex Rins (Suzuki).
Like Marquez, Rossi also bounced back to finish the day in the top 10, but his spot was in doubt until the final stage as he was held up by Karel Abraham on one of his late rounds.
But the local hero was able to improve to eighth ahead of his protégé Franco Morbidelli (Marc VDS Honda) and Tech 3 Yamaha’s Johann Zarco.
Although Zarco finished 10th, he is currently not ready to make it into Q2 automatically as Andrea Iannone’s FP1 time puts the Suzuki driver in eighth place overall.
Iannone was only 16th in FP2 as he was one of three riders who crashed at Turn 15 alongside Scott Redding and Takaaki Nakagami.
Hafizh Syahrin and Jack Miller suffered their second falls in as many sessions, their incidents occurring at Turn 8 and 16 respectively.
KTM’s Pol Espargaro, returning from his injury, languished in 24th place, beating only Syahrin (Tech 3) and MotoGP debutant Christophe Ponsson (Avintia Ducati), who cut his FP1 deficit by about a second and a half and 5, The pace was 9 seconds behind and is within the 107% limit.