Hayden rues 'disastrous' session

The American has been struggling to get up to speed on the Ducati GP8 all winter, and lost more ground in today's BMW Award shoot-out.

"This morning we made some small improvements and I was able to go a bit quicker but the qualifying session was a bit of a disaster," Hayden admitted.

"We were making some changes beforehand but ran out of time to get the bike ready and I lost some time at the beginning of the session.

"Then when I went out we had a clutch problem and I had to change to my second bike, which I've hardly ridden this weekend, and it had a different setting."

None of Stoner's Ducati team-mates have been able to get close to his pace on the Italian bikes in the last two years. Loris Capirossi eventually managed to rediscover race-winning form after a poor start to 2007, while last year's Ducati rider Marco Melandri languished at the back all season.

The team hoped that Hayden's famously aggressive style would prove more suited to the Desmosedici, but so far he has also trailed Stoner by a significant margin. The former champion conceded that he had hoped to be on his team-mate's pace by now.

"Casey has shown the package is good and to be honest I'd hoped to be closer to him by this stage but it's time to go racing now so we'll go out to Qatar, work hard and see what happens," said Hayden.