Hayden up for the fight on Saturday

American former MotoGP World Champion Nicky Hayden is not at the front of the Assen grid, but he will do everything he can to get a good result before next week’s trip home to the US and one of his favourite tracks, Laguna Seca.

Nicky Hayden – 13th

“Unfortunately qualifying is not our strong point at the moment but we made some improvements with the bike in free practice this morning. We changed the transmission, which helped a bit, and made a few more tweaks that made the general feeling of the bike a bit better but for the afternoon we tried some stuff that didn’t work so well. We had to go back to what we had this morning and I was only able to go a little bit faster, which is why the qualifying position isn’t great. The cooler track today made it hard to get heat into the left-hand side of the tyre. You don’t get good balance with the single compound tyres around here, for me at least, the right side is really good but it’s hard to get heat into the left. We’ll see what the weather brings, obviously we could do with it being nice and hot, line up and see what we got!”