Outside the top ten in the first ‘competitive’ session with his new team on Sunday at the Official MotoGP Test, Nicky Hayden left Jerez trailing his triumphant team-mate Casey Stoner by a significant 1.755s margin – as the Australian took the honours in the BMW M Award.
The 2006 World Champion survived a scary moment in the Sunday showdown session as he ran into one of the Jerez gravel traps at high velocity, fortunately managing to keep himself upright and immediately return to the track.
Having placed eleventh on the Official Practice timesheet Hayden reviewed the second day in the south of Spain saying, “In the morning we made some small improvements and I was able to go a bit quicker, but the 45-minute session was a bit of a disaster. We were making some changes beforehand but ran out of time to get the bike ready and I lost some time at the beginning of the session. Then when I went out we had a clutch problem and I had to change to my second bike, which I’ve hardly ridden this weekend, and it had a different setting.”
| 
|