Valentino Rossi, Nicky Hayden and the Ducati Team are preparing for a three-week, three-race tour de force, beginning on Saturday at Northern Holland’s TT Circuit Assen.

Valentino Rossi and Nicky Hayden both count the track amongst their favourites, and it has played host to wins for both riders: one for the American and seven for the Italian. Rossi will be looking for a much-improved showing at the Dutch circuit, after failing to get to grips with Silverstone last time out, where he finished in ninth.

And whilst Hayden’s seventh in the UK may not have seemed much better, the American will head into the Assen race with confidence, having posted the third fastest lap-time in the race. Ducati sighted one of its problems as very rapid rear-tyre degradation, which is something the Italian outfit will be looking to fix this coming weekend.

Valentino Rossi

"Assen is a great track. I like it a lot, and it brings to mind a bunch of nice memories. We’ll try to start off with a good feeling with the track in order to improve our results a bit. For the moment, we can only work on the setup to prepare the bike as we try to return to the level that we had attained prior to Silverstone, which was a very difficult race. We were a bit better at Barcelona and during the dry sessions at Le Mans, so we must at least regain that pace. If it should also happen to rain, we know that we can be more competitive."

Nicky Hayden

"Assen has changed a bit over the years, but it’s a track that I like. There are some nice, fast sections, like the last bit, coming back to the stadium. A couple of those corners with the banking are pretty fun. Assen is one of those places where you never know what the weather’s going to be like, so you just have to be prepared for anything on Saturday. If you look at the result of my last race, I can’t say that it was really positive, but we learned a couple of things. One of those is that we need to try to come up with something to be easier on the tyre, so we don’t destroy it as quickly. We’ll work on that in the Netherlands and try to get a good result."

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