Doha: The QMMF Racing Team’s riders Julian Simon and Mika Kallio battled tough conditions at the Malaysian Grand Prix to secure 12th and 14th place respectively for today’s starting grid in Sepang, Malaysia yesterday.
According to details received here, in a difficult qualifying session in which a thunderstorm built up and a rain drizzle made it impossible to take advantage of the last minutes, Simon and Kallio struggled to finish among the top ten riders.
After significant improvements to his suspension set-up, Simon had a good feeling with his bike and held fifth place for a while.
Even though he dropped out of the top ten eventually, he knows he has a strong pace and is confident about his chances for a good result.
Simon’s Finnish team-mate Kallio would have been clearly faster than 14th, but ran into traffic on the very few occasions he had to push for a fast lap, with his only hard tyre left for the session.
In today’s morning warm-up practice, he will try further modifications on his set-up in order to improve tyre life in the race.
“I am happy with the lap time and our position is good,” Simon said after the session.
“At the beginning of qualifying, I was even fifth for a while. We modified the bike for this session, especially on the suspension side, and now I have a much better feeling. The race tomorrow will for sure be decided by tyre wear. The harder compound is the only choice because the softer one is only good for one fast lap,” he added before hoping for a good start.
“A good start will be crucial tomorrow. If I get off the line well, I have the chance to score a good result because we have the pace to hang on to the leading group of riders.”
Kallio said: “We were in the Top Ten all the weekend and now we dropped back. I am not happy, because we had a chance to be in a much better position. But in qualifying, we knew we had just one chance to make a lap time, because we had just one good tyre left. We put it in immediately, for the first exit and I knew I had just two or three laps to make my fast lap, because after that, the drop in tyre performance is huge.
“In these two or three laps I always had traffic, there was always some guy in front of me. But I am still confident, because if we check the section times, I could have been around sixth or seventh. The biggest problem in the race will be consistency with the rear tyre. We will try more things in the warm-up session in order to get some more grip on the rear to save the tyre.”
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