Kallio: Soft tyres play a big role in Misano

The free practices of Friday in Misano, San Marino, offered no happy moments for Moto2-rider Mika Kallio. When the day was wrapped up, Kallio found himself from position 22 in the combined times, losing a 1,2 seconds to fastest man of the day, Tito Rabat. Kallio and his team, Italtrans, will continue with their strategy for the weekend and perform no dramatic changes to the bike for tomorrow. 

During FP1 Kallio’s pace was not too bad, but during FP2 the differences in pace became clear when nearly all riders swapped to the soft tyre mix. Kallio is currently able to work quite satisfyingly with the harder option tyre mix, but as most riders were able to shave off nearly a second of their previous lap time by using the softer tyre during the afternoon, Kallio was even slower then than during the morning. Obviously, the former soft tyre lover Kallio is not happy at all. 

-We are hitting our head against the same wall as always during this season. This morning was quite okay when I was riding with the harder tyres, but upon changing to the softer tyres everyone else seems to improve dramatically, but we become worse, since we lose the front feel completely when we have a better grip in the rear. We are not able to find any solution to this, Kallio shook his head. 

The qualifying practice of Saturday looms ahead and Kallio, being the realist he is, is not eager to speculate with any positive results due to the current tyre problems. 

-There is pretty much nothing we can do about the tyre issues we face at the moment. It does not help to swap the settings back and forth, since they do not have a clear effect on the tyre behaviour. If we find no solution on how to get the soft tyre mix working for us, we are in the shit when qualifying begins, Kallio sighed. 

-We probably will weaken the grip in the rear in order to direct more feel to the front. This happens by making the bike a bit longer and adding more weight to the front. This is our only guess on how to work better with the soft tyre, Kallio finished. 

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