I got a great start and was able to lead the second group for a while until a couple of guys came past and I lost my rhythm a bit. I made a little mistake under braking on the back straight, ran wide and lost a lot of time but I fought back and got in with the group again. I was having great fun but unfortunately the left handlebar came kind of loose about halfway through the race and cost me a lot of time – that’s when a lot of the guys got past me.

I know I’m coming out with a lot of excuses this year but a loose handlebar at that speed is pretty scary! The guys are looking at how it happened. Anyway, man it was a hard battle. I know we were only fighting for fifth or sixth but it felt like there was a title on the line out there!

Big respect to everybody in the group though. Elias made a big mistake but everybody left it all out on the track today and we all shook hands afterwards. It was good to be a part of the battle.”

The cooler track today made it hard to get heat into the left-hand side of the tyre. You don’t get good balance with the single compound tyres around here, for me at least, the right side is really good but it’s hard to get heat into the left. We’ll see what the weather brings, obviously we could do with it being nice and hot, line up and see what we got!”

The race began under threatening skies but the rain stayed away as the Repsol Honda duo quickly established themselves in second and third behind winner Casey Stoner. HRC technicians are now examining Hayden’s RC212V to discover the exact cause of his end-of-race electronics problem.

Nicky Hayden, finished 4th, 7th in World Championship

“Man, we had a pretty good race. Unfortunately this game can be cruel sometimes. To be so close to a really good result is tough, but we still finished, we made it across the line and still got some good points out of the deal, but it would’ve been nice to stand on the podium. The team certainly deserved it, they’ve worked really hard this weekend. On the sighting lap I knew something was wrong. It’s been a little bit frustrating because she hasn’t run right off the bottom since I got here, especially out of slow corners. They’ve been changing stuff and they thought they had it fixed but something was wrong. I had a dash light come on at the start of the race, though it went off after the start. She finally quit right before the finish line. It’s how it goes, I guess me and Colin are even now, he gave me one here a couple of years ago and I gave him a podium today. There at the end I was trying to make a push on Dani, I wanted to keep the pressure on him, he was coming back to me a bit. I was pushing, then on the last lap I thought ‘oh no, we’re in trouble’. Nonetheless the bike is working good, now they’ve got a week and a half to hopefully sort it out in Japan and we can keep moving on.”

DNF:
Anthony West AUS Kawasaki Racing Team (B)
Randy de Puniet FRA LCR Honda MotoGP (M)
Alex de Angelis RSM San Carlo Honda Gresini (B)

Pedrosa and Hayden were also impressive in this morning’s practice session, run on a damp and drying track, ending the outing in first and third positions. This afternoon’s conditions were dry but blustery, Pedrosa’s final lap taking him to a tantalisingly close to pole-sitter Casey Stoner. Hayden, using the pneumatic-valve RCV engine for the second race, might have done even better if he had had time to use his final qualifying tyre. He also lost some time on his fastest lap when John Hopkins crashed just in front of him as they attacked the high-speed Ramshoek left-hander in the closing stages of the hour-long outing.

Tomorrow’s 60th Assen World Championship TT is the ninth race of the 2008 season and the halfway point in the 18-race campaign.

Nicky Hayden, 4th fastest, 1m 35.975s

“This morning the bike was working quite good in the wet and on intermediates. That session sucked for learning much about the dry but I got some good experience out there on intermediates front and rear and it felt quite good, I was able to stay out and get a good feel for it. This afternoon seemed to go so quick. We tried a couple of little things on the front, but after the first run we had to go back to what we had before because the changes helped in some areas but overall they made it worse. We started putting our qualifiers and then I had an issue with the clutch which lost us some time in the tyre changes, so ultimately I didn’t get to use my last qualifier, so we had one bullet left in the chamber that we didn’t use. The Michelin qualifiers were working awesome round here, every one we put in I kept getting faster, so it would’ve been fun to fire the last one in there. It’s going to be a hard race tomorrow, I’m not making no predictions, we’ll see what we can do, go for the best result we can.”

In sunny but blustery conditions Hayden and Pedrosa were second and third fastest this morning. Both riders improved their times this afternoon, though Pedrosa dropped several places while trying out different settings. Hayden is using the pneumatic-valve RCV engine for the second time this weekend while Pedrosa sticks with the conventional spring-valve engine.

This year’s Dutch TT is a particularly historic event. Assen is the only MotoGP track surviving from the World Championship’s inaugural year in 1949, making this the 60th consecutive World Championship event at the Dutch venue.

Nicky Hayden, 4th fastest, 1m 37.012s

“It’s nice to finally see a little bit of summer weather starting to hit Europe. The track is in great condition, they did a great job of having it clean, so we were able to get up to speed a lot faster than last year. All in all it’s been a pretty solid day. We made a little bit of an improvement this afternoon. I wasn’t able to improve my best time by much but I was able to be a lot more consistent out there. I was hoping to go a little quicker at the end which didn’t happen. The bike’s working pretty well here but we’re certainly going to have to step it up a bit to get in there and be really competitive. We’ve got a few ideas to try and make it a little bit better tomorrow, the rider too.”