Red Bull KTM happy to be in 250cc championship fight

Red Bull KTM´s title assault in the 250cc class is alive and well going into the summer break, despite Mika Kallio´s conceding the lead of the World Championship at the Alice Motorrad Grand Prix Deutschland. The team may not have ascended the heights of their 2007 one-two at Sachsenring, but overall both the race and the season as a whole have left the team happy.

Francesco Guidotti from the Austrian outfit was pragmatic about the current position in the standings as the summer vacations began, as he explained shortly after seeing Kallio and teammate Hiroshi Aoyama place in the top ten.

`We haven´t had a good start to the season for the past two years; we didn´t have the chance to fight for the championship so to be second now with Mika means that we can be quite confident,´ explained the Italian.

`We didn´t have the perfect wet setting at this race, so Mika´s feeling with the bike wasn´t 100%. We´re still happy in general. As far as Hiroshi goes, in the dry you can make a little mistake and nothing comes of it. When you do the same in the wet, it can lead to a crash. That´s what happened with Hiroshi, but he managed to finish in the top ten in any case. It wasn´t quite as good as last year for him, but our one-two that time came when we didn´t have the chance to fight for the title.´

With World Championship leader Marco Simoncelli upgrading bikes to the Gilera RSA, the pressure is on KTM to provide Kallio with further improvement in order to stick with his Italian rival. Developments are in the pipeline, based on performance at the recent Brno test.

`We will be using the same chassis for at least the next three races. As far as the engine goes, we are working on it every day and it could improve all the time,´ concluded Guidotti.´