Nicky Hayden was feeling confident going into the race of the GP of Catalunya. His performance had been improving through out the weekend and he was hoping to put in a good result. The Repsol Honda rider had a good start, but the race wasn’t as much fun as he’d hope it would be. The reigning world champion got hindered again by a problem; his tyres. Nicky Hayden could not keep up the pace and his lap times were getting slower and slower.

Nicky Hayden about the race 

“Through this weekend I’d been moving up and getting faster and faster in every session and going up a few places. I got a decent start in the race and I was looking to get a decent result here because my pace in the warm-up was reasonable too.

The race was a tough one though. Somewhere along the way it looks like the rear tyre turned on the rim and unbalanced it, which meant it started to vibrate and chatter really badly - especially in the last five or ten laps I could hardly ride it.

After that I just started losing positions and it wasn’t a fun race because it was hard to tip it into any of the corners. We didn’t need that problem today so we’ll just have to look into why it happened and move on to the next one at Donington.”