Kallio rides through the pain in post-GP test

A crash on the opening lap in Sunday’s Catalan GP left the Finn with pain in his ribs

Mika Kallio (Red Bull KTM Factory Racing) took part in his second wild card appearance of the season at the Gran Premi Monster Energy de Catalunya as he and KTM continue their development of the RC16.

However, a crash on the opening lap of Sunday’s race left the Finn with right rib injuries, making it difficult for him to feel comfortable on the bike during Monday’s Official Test. “Basically I just did a few laps today, quite slowly and carefully. There were two reasons for that, even without the crash that I had yesterday we had a test plan to do a couple of laps, check a few things,” explained KTM’s Official Test Rider.

Kallio continued, “but yeah the crash yesterday was quite bad, I have quite a lot of pain on the right side in the ribs and let’s see, I will now go back to hospital to see what’s going on, they will check a little bit more deeply if they can find something because when I was on the bike today it was quite complicated to move on the bike and the riding was difficult so yeah, it wasn’t the best solution for today.”

Mika Kallio, Red Bull KTM Factory Racing, Gran Premi Monster Energy de Catalunya

The 35-year-old completed 16 laps, mainly testing the electronics on the KTM machine. “Yeah basically it was some electronic stuff, like I said it was really just the plan to do a few runs, a few exits and that’s all and basically the bikes that I used yesterday went to the other guys Pol and Bradley and they did some laps with those so yeah, we didn’t miss too much but it would be better to be in better shape.”

Now, there isn’t any testing scheduled for Kallio, but we’ll see him return at the Sachsenring next month to compete in his third wild card of the year. “Now we are going to the wind tunnel to see if we can improve things over there, and basically then I will be on the bike at the Sachsenring. Now there is no testing we just need to analyse the last few weeks, especially here this weekend and then yeah for the Sachsenring bike we need to see if there’s something new.”