After Nicky Hayden’s brief MotoGP™ cameo at Aragon last week it was back to his main focus on Friday at Magny-Cours, as the Honda World Superbike Team rider began to get a feel for the French track.

Hayden ended day one of the #FrenchWorldSBK weekend lapping 1.263s down on pace setter Chaz Davies (Aruba.it Racing – Ducati) in 13^th place on the combined FP1-FP2 timesheets.

Explaining a tough day on track he stated, “Definitely not my best Friday of the year! Probably one of, it not the worst Fridays in terms of getting up to speed. I’m definitely not happy with how it went. Excuses here, but it’s adjusting back to Superbikes and getting up to speed on this new track was not easy, so I was 1.2s off in the morning and 1.2s off still in the afternoon. I’m not really happy with my performance today but more because we didn’t really find the right direction.”

Hinting at what he needs to look at on Saturday morning before Race 1, he added, “I need some more information from the bike and to get rid of some of the moving. At the moment I have a lot of moving and not a lot of rear grip. We went softer looking for grip, maybe we need to look at going stiffer and trying to work the tyres more in the ground. We need to look at the data and see where to go.”