The Flying Finn

Mika Kallio is the first Finn in 30 years who is very fast and very successful on only two wheels. And his fellow Finns showed their appreciation by electing the runner-up in the 125cc class of the World Championships as Finland’s top motor-sport athlete.

That the Finns have a knack for stretching the laws of physics when it comes to driving motor-sport vehicles has been amply demonstrated over the past several seasons of rally and Formula One competition. But conventional wisdom has it that a Finn needs four wheels to be really fast. Mika Kallio dispelled this myth once and for all last season. The 23-year-old won four races of the World Road Race Championships with his 125cc Red Bull KTM, finishing among the top three a total of ten times and ending the World Championship season in second place – edged out by Swiss rider Thomas Lüthi by only five points. The people of Finland were obviously delighted with the performance: Mika was voted “Best Finnish Motor-Sport Athlete of 2005,” ahead of Formula One driver Kimi Räikkönen (World Championship runner-up this past season) and rally driver Marcus Grönholm (third in the last World Rally Championships).

 

The end of a slump

The Finns were especially appreciative that Mika had put an end to his aggravating slump: on April 17, 2005, in Estoril, he drove to victory in a World Championship race for the first time in his career – 30 years after the last Finnish triumph in a motorcycle Grand Prix, when Pentti Korhonen won the 1975 GP in Yugoslavia in the 350cc class. The fact that three more victories – on the Sachsenring (GER), in Montegi (I), and in Valencia (SP) – still wasn’t enough to give him the overall title simply serves to spur Mika on for the coming season: “When I look back on the season, I think I missed winning the title just because of a little bad luck. But my eight pole positions show that we were fast enough.”

 

Chill-out on the ice

Mika piloted a motorcycle for the first time when he was 13. “I just knew it was my calling,” he recalls. At 15 he competed in the Finnish Championships, making his debut with a second-place finish, and at 17 he captured the Finnish title for the first time. Mika relaxes from World Championship races, in which he has been competing regularly since 2002, by getting out on the ice: in the winter he competes in ice races. And he’s no slouch in this discipline, either: he’s a four-time Finnish Ice Racing Champion.