There was disappointment once again for Mika Kallio on Sunday as he raced well in the early phases of the bwin.com Grande Premio de Portugal event, before smashing out on lap six when challenging to keep sixth place.

Kallio has crashed in events on five occasions this year in his rookie MotoGP season and has been able to claim points in only eight events, which has been very frustrating for himeself and his squad, given his talent. The Finn has three more events this year to claim some good results and look for extra consistency next season, having announced his renewed contract with Pramac for 2010 recently.

After Sunday’s event he stated, “I am very disappointed. I was doing really well and all of a sudden I myself on the ground. I wasn’t pushing too much, in that part of the track you don’t accelerate or brake, you just maintain the rhythm to accelerate later while exiting the corner going to the final straight. The front gave up on me and I slid to the dirt on the side of the track. I am very sorry for all the team, they deserved a good result and I hope to do better in these last three races.”

Fabiano Sterlacchini, the Pramac Racing Technical boss adds, “We are very disappointed that Mika lost the chance to get a good result. He deserved it for how the weekend went. During the warm up we found a really good solution on the bike and we got the fifth fastest lap of the session. In the race things seemed to go in the right direction, but we all know how things ended.”

“Back in the garage Mika told us he wasn’t pushing and he suddenly lost the front. We will try to understand what has happened when we look at the data. We hope that we will be able to do much better in the next race in Australia.”