And yet as cloudy as his head was, Hayden didn't consider skipping the race. "Never," he said, though the race wasn't without problems. "Where my leg got hit, it was kinda giving me little problems. Everybody has problems. I'm just glad we made it. We got top 20, it's not great, we definitely wanted a lot better. We just got caught up in somebody else's mess."
And what of DiSalvo? Twenty-fourth on the first of 17 laps, the New Yorker patiently made his way through the field on a track where passing was difficult. Twelfth at the halfway point, he moved to ninth three laps from the end and won a spirited three-way battle for the spot, edging series regular Anthony West by .028 seconds. DiSalvo was understandably ecstatic.
"I'm extremely happy. I'm over the moon," he said as sweat poured down his face. "I just can't thank the crew enough. They did an amazing job getting this thing put together and everything. It was a war out there and I had one of the best weapons there was in the field."
The American Honda Moto2 team definitely wouldn't disagree with the term "war".