2006 MotoGP World Champion Hayden was happy with his first day’s work at the GP of Portugal, making only minor changes to his RC212V’s setup, and is looking forward to further progress tomorrow. Last year Nicky Hayden got pole position and the lap record here.

Nicky Hayden - 4th fastest - 1′38.688

“Everything went pretty well, it’s been quite a positive day, I think we had a pretty good start to things. Sure we’re gonna have to improve a little bit, but seems like in the wet and dry we got a bike working relatively well, so if we can sweeten up a few things tomorrow, hopefully we can really be up there come Sunday. More or less the bike was working okay without a lot of big changes, so we’re running a pretty similar setup to what I ran at Jerez, just a few little clickers here and there. Conditions were not easy, the morning was wet, then half and half and the afternoon was a little bit patchy and windy, so sure it was quite challenging, but the team’s done a good job and we’ve got a pretty decent setup, so we’ll see tomorrow.”