Ducati's Nicky Hayden was forced to ride his second bike in today's Sachsenring MotoGP round after destroying his favoured GP13 in morning warm-up and ended up riding around for 30 laps, trying not to crash again.
Hayden found himself in the kitty litter more than once over the weekend and after several rebuilds, he had no option but to race the alternate bike which had a different swingarm than his usual and he found all manner of problems when the lights went out.
"This certainly wasn't a good day. Starting from the warm-up, I had another crash in the same place for no apparent reason, it was quite a strange one and in the race I had just not a really good feeling in the front, couldn't stop the bike, on exit I had a couple of really big moments and it was quite frustrating," said Hayden, speaking at the Sachsenring.
"I had decent pace this weekend to do ok but in the race the bike felt completely different. Even though this morning's crash was an easy one, the bike flipped and bent the frame, so I had to switch to the second bike which I had been out on but not much.
"With the same setup, the bike felt different. I had a different swingarm because the swingarm I like was in the other bike. It wasn't completely the same, the pace was terrible and I wasn't even able to race. I was riding around, trying to stay on. It ran wide, I couldn't stop it and there was no edge grip. I could not get any traction to drive forward and we don't understand why.