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Home arrow MotoGP News arrow Hayden looking forward to going 'toe-to-toe'

Hayden looking forward to going 'toe-to-toe'

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Monday, 13 March 2006
Having been thrust into the role of 'development rider' it's been a busy pre-season for Nicky Hayden, who's now looking forward to the 'fun part' - racing. Teammate Dani Pedrosa would perhaps prefer a little more testing time to get used to the upgrade to an RCV, but his times throughout this test and over the course of the winter have been impressive. But can he keep it up over a race distance?

Nicky Hayden - 1'40.570, 109 laps

"Well all the testing's all over and now it's time for the real deal. Next time we get on the bikes it'll be showtime. I'd like to say we're right there and everything's all gravy but the truth is still couldn't quite get the bike to stay in line and get hooked up as good as we wanted. We've made some progress today and at the end we put on some soft tyres, not qualifiers, just to see what it would do and that definitely helped my lap time a lot. And I did a full race run to get a feeling but it was hard to maintain the pace. Nonetheless, I'm excited to go racing. Testing's cool but going toe-to-toe with the boys is the fun part!"

Dani Pedrosa - 1'40.416, 81 laps

"It's been a very good pre-season for me because each time on the bike I've been able to improve step-by-step. I did a lot of laps over the winter and this is very useful to get to know the bike because the step up from the 250 to MotoGP is much bigger than the step from 125 to 250. Physically I'm getting stronger and this will continue throughout the year. I'm starting to understand how the tyres work, though I need more experience with the electronics, on race starts and qualification tyres. I don't know if I'm ready for round one - we'll have to wait and see!"

Makoto Tanaka - Repsol Honda Team Manager

"We have worked through a demanding menu of testing here, in readiness for the up-coming Spanish GP. Both Nicky and Dani have done lots of laps. Thanks to all of our staff, they all worked very hard during this pre-season test schedule. Dani showed very good progress today, especially with his consistency during the long run with race tyres. Dani made good progress, more than what we hoped, so we are very much looking forward to the opening race. We are the quickest Michelin runner throughout three days of testing here and Nicky showed good speed and he gave us the top two times of the Michelin runners. But Nicky hasn't got the perfect set-up yet and we still have a lot of work to do to improve his machine for the race. We have some positive feeling from a good race tyre pace but still need more hard work. We'll do our best to ensure a good race here in Jerez."


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