Gordon Ritchie | June 17, 2016
Nicky Hayden is merging into an impressive Superbike racer.
Nicky Hayden’s growth into the role of top Superbike rider has been conducted at pace, in all ways, culminating in a race win at Sepang in the wet on his Honda World Superbike Fireblade.
In the dry at Misano, and after a test the week before at the same venue, he was fastest of all on Friday, in a close afternoon session that he headed up by 0.122 seconds.
“It is very nice to be fastest but it is really only one lap, to be honest,” said Hayden. “I am not happy with my session at all. We had a lot of little issues with electronics and it was showing me wrong lap times and wrong split times. So it was not as consistent as I would have liked it to be – but in the end I am fastest. We really have to improve the pace for Saturday, then we will see. I was happy with my fast lap time but I would have been a lot happier if I had done seven or eight of those. To do that lap time I really pushed a lot.”
Hayden was satisfied with some new rubber brought by Pirelli at the previous round, and that he used again at Misano. “The new Pirelli tyres we got for Donington, and again here, seem to be working really good for grip and consistency so thanks to those guys as they have definitely done a little step on the rear tyre. There are two new ones, same family, but two new ones.”
Hayden also acknowledged that testing before the race weekend at Misano, with many of his rivals, was a good thing to get things started off well at Misano on race weekend.
“For sure the test helped us and you can see that the top ten was within half a second today, and it changed quick,” said Hayden. “The tests do not make two seconds of difference but you start out a little bit quicker and it helped is. It was the first chance we have had to try a couple of things on the bike since the season started. It was quite useful because on the weekends in World Superbike you get Friday and then ‘Boom!’ Saturday for the race – and with one bike you do not really have a lot of time to try some stuff, big stuff, and we were able to do that at the test. I am very grateful to the team to make the effort to get here from Donington, which was not easy, but it was useful to test here.”
Hayden also made comment about the track surface, which was resurfaced last year, but has got a little bit ‘modified’ partly because it is apparently used so much. “I am based around here, I cycle around here a lot and every day you pass by here there is something going around on the track. Even at night there are lights going around. There are a few bumps going into turn one, and turn four where a lot of people crash – because you can see big marks, but the track surface is OK. I would say it was better at the test because there have been MotoGP guys, and Ducati stated ahead of us, so this morning the first 20 minutes was a little bit slippery. There has been a lot of rain here in the past days and you could see that there was no rubber.”
