The second Supersport World Championship round has drawn to a close, but unfortunately not with the results that the PETRONAS MIE Racing Honda Team was hoping for. On track at the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve in Portugal this weekend, Toba and Azman only had a short warm-up on Sunday morning in which to make final preparations for the subsequent race. 

Race 2 ran over a distance of 17 laps in dry, sunny conditions. Getting away from twenty-third on the grid, Kaito made a good start, holding his starting position through the initial stages. But it wasn’t the Japanese rider’s day, as a technical problem sadly put an end to his race at the end of lap 2. Syarifuddin made a determined start to race 2, keen to improve on his race 1 performance. Up into twenty-seventh by lap four, the young Malaysian rookie kept a cool head as he battled with his closest rivals and pushed to gain ground. Part of a small group of three or four riders, Azman continued to fight to defend his position, crossing the line twenty-fifth and collating solid data for future reference.

Kaito Toba lies fifteenth in the WorldSSP standings, with 9 points, at the end of this second championship round, while Azman is yet to get points on the board. The next championship round will take place on 11-13 April, when the PETRONAS MIE Racing Honda Team will take to the Assen TT Circuit in The Netherlands 

Kaito Toba #27

“In today’s warm up we made a step with the bike’s set up, which allowed us to get close to the top 10. I was confident when we started the race and started moving up through the field. However, a technical issue with the bike forced me to retire. The team is now checking what happened and we’ll work in order to avoid this in the future.”

Syarifuddin Azman #63

“Yes, firstly I want to thank everybody on my team for doing such a good job this weekend. I was able to improve session by session on the bike and I had good feeling during race 2. The only thing is that I had some problems with arm pump during the race, and so I couldn’t do much more than I did. From about five laps into the race, I was experiencing pain in my hand and so just tried my best to keep calm and complete the race in order to build experience. Now we look ahead to Assen; I’ll see what I can do about the pain in my arm ahead of the next race weekend.”