Hayden's engineer disappointed with gap

After a poor start to 2007, Hayden has now finished on the podium in three of the last four races, but Benson's primary concern was the 13-second gap to the victorious Casey Stoner at Brno.

Suzuki's John Hopkins took second, six seconds clear of Hayden's Honda.

"It's a reasonable result, but you can see we're still miles away from Stoner and the Ducati," Benson said.

"Even Hopkins on the Suzuki was half a second per lap faster almost every lap. So I'm happy with our result, but not if you look at the big picture.

"It is good to be the first Honda, first Michelin-runner, all that kind of thing, but at the end of the day that's not really what you're here for. We have to beat everybody."

Repsol Honda introduced several upgrades for this weekend's race, but Hayden was sceptical about their effectiveness after practice.

The team persisted with the new parts throughout the three days, and will continue working with them in the post-race test.

Benson suspects the problem could have been the set-up the team were using rather than the new components themselves, and will use the test to investigate this.

"We're going to re-check that what we did was the right thing," he said.

"Because obviously when you do things over the race weekend you're very limited for time. We had a couple of problems over the weekend and we just didn't make enough progress quick enough.

"So we're really not 100 percent sure about a couple of things and we're going to go back and re-check them."