Nicky Hayden had high hopes of a strong race following a promising performance in morning warm-up but the American ran into difficulties and came home an unlucky 13th. After Mugello the MotoGP action switches to Spain for the following weekend’s Catalan GP outside Barcelona. This is MotoGP’s busiest period with six races over eight weekends.

Nicky Hayden:

“This morning we made a nice step, we made a suspension adjustment and the bike felt a lot better, so we had a pretty good pace. We were certainly unlucky in the race. I got an awesome start, felt pretty good, but it was clear from the beginning that we had a problem.

Guys started coming past and there was nothing I could do, there was no way to defend. So I just tried to get to the finish and get a couple of points. They’re checking the data now to see exactly what happened.

Like I said, we were quite unlucky, I knew we didn’t have Rossi’s pace this morning, but we had enough pace to be in there, to be quite competitive. I don’t know yet which engine I’ll be using next weekend. To be honest, I’ve been concentrating on this race, so I haven’t thought about it yet.”