After qualifying a season's best second, Hayden surrendered two places at the start before re-passing Repsol Honda team-mate Dani Pedrosa - leaving only Suzuki's John Hopkins and Ducati's Casey Stoner ahead of him. Nevertheless, as soon as he reached a straight, Hayden claims all thoughts of a debut 800cc win were shattered.

"When I got into third position on lap two of the race I was thinking 'now you've got to get on [Stoner's] back wheel' and for about three corners it was looking pretty good. But then I got onto the straight, looked up and realised that really I was just dreaming," revealed Nicky, who remained in third right to the chequered flag. "So I just kept my rhythm and I really feel like I got the best out of the bike, myself and the tyres today. I'm pretty happy with the podium and I feel like we've done a decent job this weekend."

The world champion had a revised engine and chassis on hand for Brno, but believes a change to his front fork set-up made the difference.

"Yesterday afternoon we made quite a big change with the front forks and I liked the results a lot," said the American after his third podium of the year. "Hopefully we can keep this form going and get a little bit stronger from now on. I'd also like to dedicate this podium to Cedric Laprael, the parts guy in the Repsol Honda Team, who isn't here this weekend because he had a parachuting accident during the summer break. Get well Cedric. The team's going to stay for a couple of days testing with some new parts from Honda and a lot of Michelin tyres so we can to try and bridge the gap to these front guys."

"Nicky put in a very good performance and made good use of the latest engine and chassis developments to score his third podium of the year," added team manager Makoto Tanaka. "I hope that he can continue his good form and return to the top step soon. We hoped for higher ground temperatures today which would have favoured our tyres more. Our rivals were very strong again today so we must work hard in the testing days and continue to make improvements for the upcoming races."