Hayden disappointed after no points in Jerez

Nicky Hayden finished outside the points at Jerez and afterwards the American was clearly disappointed to have ended the 27 lap race in 17th position. It’s been a very difficult year for Hayden with the Aspar team trying to come to terms with the new Open Honda and with Ducati having a strong Open bike this year it’s made things very congested in the midfield pack.

“It’s a shame to have a race like that,” said Hayden afterwards. “The position is so bad. In the beginning I really didn’t do a great start and I didn’t have very good pace. My pace throughout the race wasn’t too bad. If you look at the lap times Hernandez in tenth after about ten laps was ten seconds in front of me. After 27 laps he was still about ten seconds ahead of me. I just couldn’t go fast in the beginning.

“It wasn’t as if I was getting held up. We wasn’t quick enough. I was able to maintain, keep up my pace and pick up a couple of positions late. But Jerez is a track I normally enjoy, I normally go well at and I hoped to be able to do a better race today. Luckily we have a race tomorrow to try and improve something.”

In the early stages of the race Hayden commented the he was pushing the front but that overall “we just weren’t fast enough.”

Electronics have been a constant bugbear for Aspar and with a lack of personnel it is getting harder for the team to be competitive.

“We are making progress with the electronics. It just takes a long time. We had some new issues this weekend that we haven’t really experienced before, switching between some of the higher gears was even giving us more problems. We don’t have a lot of electronic guys. Me and Eugene, we share telemetry guys. We need time to work it all out. We are seeing some improvements for sure.”