Quartararo made his eleventh straight start from the front row this season after putting his Yamaha in third on the grid in Aragon on Saturday, albeit 0.397 seconds behind poleman Francesco Bagnaia.
The Yamaha rider says he expected a strong qualifying run as he still started from pole even last year when he finished poorly 18th at the Aragon GP.
Based on the races in FP4, Quartararo is one of the strongest runners, but believes he has to take another step overnight to be on the hunt for the podium on Sunday.
“Yes, I don’t really have a clear goal for tomorrow,” said Quartararo, who is defending a 65-point lead.
“I want to have fun. Of course it would be great to fight for the podium.
“But to be honest, I don’t feel like I have the pace, so I’ll try to get the best result possible, stay at the top and fight to the end.
“But now we have to take at least one step in the warm-up to be able to fight for the podium tomorrow.
“So let’s hope for an improvement in the warm-up.”
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Pointing out where he believes he needs to improve, Quartararo says he is “doing something wrong” on the final corner and this only wastes more time in an already weak final sector for Yamaha.
“Yeah, I knew I was pretty quick on one lap,” he added.
“Here we took pole position in the first race last year, but the Ducatis weren’t that fast last year.
“Well, I think that’s also a point I wasn’t expecting.
“But I’m really happy about this lap time, because that’s the maximum I could achieve.
“We’re pretty good in all areas. Sector four is a sector, ok the Yamaha is not that great, but I’m also doing something wrong in the last corner.
“So, I think it’s a combination of everything that I’m really slow in this sector.
“But we will see, we always try something in FP2, FP3, FP4 and the basis in FP2 was a bit better.
“So tomorrow morning we’ll go back to the basic setting and I’ll try to work on my driving style in the last corner.”