Nicky Hayden was impressive this morning, running third fastest, but wasn’t quite able to repeat the performance in qualifying, coming out eighth.

The morning session started on a wet track following an earlier downpour but by the end of the hour Pedrosa and Hayden were both running fast on race tyres, the only riders to improve on their Friday pace. Hayden  is confident of his race pace and will be focusing all his attention on getting a flying start from the third row to get him into the first corner in a front-running position.

Nicky Hayden, eighth fastest, 1m 21.876s

“This morning we made a bit of an improvement and I was able to improve my lap time even though the track wasn’t so good, so I was quite excited, I thought we had a good chance in qualifying. At the start of qualifying I was going decent on some pretty used tyres that by the end had race distance on them, so I felt pretty good. But the qualifiers didn’t go as we wanted. We had an issue with a front wheel sensor when I went out on my third qualifier, so we had to come in and change the sensor, which lost us some time and some rhythm. Basically we didn’t get it done. On qualifiers my T1 and T2 times were really good but T3 and T4 weren’t so good. It seems like maybe we were a little soft on the front suspension or we’ve improved the rear so much that maybe it’s overworking the front tyre. Looking at tomorrow, I’ve gotten some good starts this year, we’re right in the middle of the third row, so I’m sure there’s going to be plenty of drama, plenty of action. I feel like we’ve got a decent pace, so the race should be okay.”