With what is considered to be his final factory Ducati race for this year at least, with Casey Stoner is rumoured to be back on the circuit in Portugal at the commencement of the next round of the MotoGP World Championship.  Mika Kallio took his opportunity fairly well on Sunday to sign off from the Ducati Marlboro squad with his best premier class result.

The MotoGP rookie finshed over the line in seventh place, and was only less than four seconds away from fourth placed Andrea Dovizioso at the finale of the event, an addition to his eighth placing at Indianapolis, he came back from his Brno DNF on the factory Desmosedici.

Commening on the event, Kallio states, “I think we can be quite happy, because that was the best result so far this season and also fourth place was not so far away, just a few seconds ahead of me. I got away ok but the first two corners were not so good as a few guys crashed in front of me and I lost a few positions there so it was difficult to catch the guys ahead of us.”

On his experience with the factory squad overall he adds, “It was more or less how I expected, of course I hoped that we could get better results, because in Brno I crashed with Marco Melandri and at Indianapolis I didn’t have too much confidence on the bike so we weren’t that fast there, but here at Misano everything was already at a better level, so the confidence was coming back lap by lap. Then in the race we were quite fast so I think that without the incident on the first lap we would have been able to fight for fourth.”