Kallio says lack of track time ‘not fair’

Teammate Niccolò Canepa was suffering from backache in Assen on Thursday, but teammate Mika Kallio had a pain in the neck that was less physical. The Finn was left frustrated by another opening session playing catch-up with the more experienced premier class riders.

Mika Kallio – 13th

"It's not fair this way. In the first day of work in every race we start too behind compared to the riders that have already ridden in MotoGP on that track the year before. If we would have two hours at our disposal, like last season, things would be different, but we must take it the way it is. It seems simple but it's not easy to find the best lines to follow at each track. I don't want to be polemical but I wanted to make it clear: our potential, as we demonstrated in other occasions, is much better than the thirteenth place. Anyway compared to other first days of free practice things have gone better and this gives us a lot of trust. In addition I missed the possibility of another lap by a couple of seconds, otherwise I am convinced that we could have already improved our best lap time."

Niccolò Canepa - 18th

"As soon as I concluded free practice I went to the mobile clinic because I had a lot of pain in my back. It's been a couple of days that I have backache, but I am sure that this will not compromise my performances on track. Today we didn't start in the best way due to some technical problems that didn't allow us to do what we have planned in the first half of the session. We have to understand what happened to be at the best in the next two days of work. We have tried to solve the problems in the last minutes but at that time there wasn’t so much time left."