Marlboro Ducati newboy Nicky Hayden has given the new Bridgestone tyres a big thumbs up and believes that only having two compounds of rubber available will focus teams and riders.

The 2006 MotoGP Champion finished 11th fastest after the first day of testing at Sepang in Malaysia and reckons he is struggling with corner exit speed but has some ideas to fix the problem he calls 'pump' - compression and rebound suspension settings, I am guessing.

"I like the new tyre rule. We’d got to a point where we were working too much on the tyres and there wasn’t enough time to work on the set-up of the bike," said Hayden.

"Now we just have a choice of two tyres, both of which work well even though I’m not able to get the most out of the harder compound yet, and that makes the job much easier for the team.

"The bike feels good on the brakes and it is stable and precise in the fast corners. I’m struggling a bit on corner exit though because it still tends to pump quite a lot and I’m not used to that yet. We’re working to reduce it and we’ve got a couple of ideas that we’ll check out over the next two days."