Kallio: Finger injury not a problem

The Finn's ring finger on his left hand was trapped beneath his Pramac Ducati when he crashed on the final lap at Assen, and sustained severe damage as he slid across the ground, causing him to miss the Laguna Seca race.

Although the finger is still heavily bandaged and far from healed, Kallio says he is ready to race again at the Sachsenring.

"This looks quite bad, but the pain is now okay," he said. "It's not so bad for riding. If I feel too much pain they'll just need to do some injections and that's it. Of course it would be much nicer without this, but that's how it is."

He expects qualifying to be a bigger issue than the race.

"I know it will be really tough weekend for us," Kallio admitted. "This finger is not so good, but even if qualifying is not good then for sure in the race we will push."

The 250cc graduate had been a superb start to his MotoGP career, with a series of early top ten results, then lost momentum before getting back on the pace at Assen, where he was fighting for sixth when he fell. He is confident that the accident and injury will not derail his season.

"The start [of the season] was really good, but then we had some problems and we struggled a little bit with some settings, and the feeling with the bike was not really what I wanted," said Kallio.

"That's why the results were a little bit down. But now I think we are coming back. Like we saw in Assen, when everything was good, the speed and lap times were consistent and good during the race. Normally during the race I was a little bit faster compared to the others, but that was even in qualifying."