Tommy Hayden, 28, the newest Yoshimura Suzuki rider, is hoping he will be fit to ride at Dunlop’s tire test at Daytona International Speedway in early December after suffering a serious concussion and an ankle injury in a crash during testing last week at Sepang in Malaysia. After a one-day shakedown test November 1 at Willow Springs in California, Hayden, six-time AMA Superbike Champion Mat Mladin and a portion of the Yoshimura Suzuki team traveled to Malaysia to share the Sepang circuit with several of the MotoGP World Championship teams. All but two hours of the first day of the test (November 15) was washed out by rain, but Tommy Hayden had set the positions of his seat, hand and foot control positions on his new GSX-R1000 Superbike and was looking forward to starting his testing program on the second day (November 16). “We were testing rear shocks,” Hayden told Roadracingworld.com in a November 20 telephone interview from his home in Owensboro, Kentucky. “I’m not too sure what happened, really. It was a little bit slick-feeling. I was working on getting more traction. I was sliding around a little bit but nothing scary at all. “Then just out of nowhere, I highsided in third gear, pretty much wide open. It was big. I remember highsiding and that I wasn’t gonna save it. And I barely remember that.” Hayden was taken to the nearest hospital, where he started to wake up in a daze, strapped to a hospital gurney, not knowing where he was at and not knowing why the people around him were not speaking English. “It was a little bit of an ugly situation,” admitted the two-time AMA Supersport Champion. Hayden was originally scheduled to do a short test on his GSX-R600 Supersport bike this week, before heading to the Dunlop test in Florida. But the Supersport test has been cancelled, and Hayden’s participation in the Dunlop test is questionable due to post-concussion symptoms and an ankle injury. “I’ve only ever had one other time when I’ve hit my head like this, so I don’t really have a lot of experience with it,” said Hayden, who also has a swollen and bruised ankle but no fractures. “If I move around I start to feel bad, get dizzy. Today I’ve been really tired, but before that I haven’t felt the tiredness. I’ve slept pretty much since I got back. [laughs] Honestly, I don’t know what’s jetlag and what’s concussion. That was a long trip. It took me 30 hours to get home from Malaysia.”