QMMF Racing Team’s Mika Kallio in action during the race yesterday.

Agencies/Phillip Island, Australia
 
QMMF Racing Team rider Mika Kallio scored eighth place at the Australian Grand Prix, even as teammate Julian Simon struggled to drop out of the points zone yesterday.
Kallio was not entirely happy with the way the race, which was won by Spanish pole-sitter Alex Rins, went. After a start from the second row on the grid, the 32-year-old held fourth and fifth place on the opening laps, but realized quickly that it was not his day to fight for a podium finish. An inexplicable lack of rear tyre grip cost him between half a second and one second per lap and there was little he could do to prevent his strongest rivals from attacking.
“From the beginning of the race, our lap times were completely different to yesterday, like half to one second slower and we don’t know why. Everything was exactly the same as yesterday on the bike, but I didn’t have enough grip on the rear with the same tyre, whereas some other riders were able to keep the same pace,” Kallio said.
“The guys we were beating yesterday in the fight for a good grid position were much faster than us today. For me, this is something really strange. I don’t understand those tyres at all. I expected to be much faster and in a better position in the race, but we couldn’t follow the front guys at all. For the first two, three laps, I manage to stay on the same rhythm, but after that I dropped a lot of speed.”
Simon had hoped to be able to solve his problems in the last left-hand corner of the track, but it turned out that the 24-lap race distance was an even tougher challenge than qualifying practice. Starting from tenth on the grid, he was 14th and 15th on the first two laps, but then dropped out of the point rankings and finished the race in 18th place.
“I don’t have much to say except that I wasn’t really good and I didn’t have a very good feeling. Especially in the last two corners, my riding was bad, because I can’t reach the right footpeg with my right foot. I thought I would be able to keep the pace of the others despite this problem, but it turned out that it wasn’t possible with just one leg and I lost a lot of time in the last sector,” Simon said.
Rins jumped off the pole on his Kalex and gave no one a chance to post a 6.633-second victory over Britain’s Sam Lowes with Italian Lorenzo Baldassarri third.
It was Rins’s second victory in his rookie Moto2 season and followed his Moto3 win at the same track two years ago.
This season’s Moto2 world champion Frenchman Johann Zarco did not threaten and finished seventh.