David’s Diary – Prepping for Morgan Park

Not long now until the MTAQ Racing Team hits the track for our next event, this time back to Morgan Park in Warwick for the 2nd instalment of the 2017 Queensland championships this weekend!

The tight turnaround since our last event at Ipswich as kept the team busy with a few late nights at the MTA Institute getting the Excel ready.

Whilst in terms of actual result, the Ipswich round was a good result gone begging due to a clutch problem – it did provide some great encouragement in terms of the speed the car is starting to develop. We got out of Ipswich with next to no damage and not a lot of broken items to repair, meaning we can turn our attention to maintaining our development curve. We have another raft of improvements coming for this next event, as we continue to learn and experiment more. Most of this surrounds improving the engine power, in which we have taken another step forward I am happy to say.

Our main opposition has a four-year head start on us, so we are pushing to try and make up the speed deficit. Despite its basic production car roots, The Excel is certainly not a straightforward car to get the most out of, as we have learned so far! But we are having a great time thinking our way through things, problem solving, trying theories and it is great training for our MTAQ crew.

The key takeaway from the Federal Cup at Ipswich was the quality of the competition in Queensland at the moment.

The young fellow that did the winning that weekend is the defending Queensland state champion, Cam Bartholomew. After winning the Federal cup and knocking off front runners from NSW and VIC in the process, that has elevated him to probably the form runner in the country at the moment – and the early favourite for the Excel Australian Championship at Goulburn in November. As Cam is a local, we come up against him at our state rounds. This is good because that gives us a great yardstick as to our own performance, with the downside being the bar is set pretty high to beat him to the chequered flag!

The Queensland championship is probably one the hardest fought out of the Excel states, which is a great sign for the future of the category and provides a super competitive pathway for our emerging talent to develop skills that will hold them in good stead on their way up the ladder, and we have a few young guys in our local series here that certainly can progress.

This weekend should be hard fought, and we intend to be right in the thick of the battle.

Thank you again everyone for your wonderful support, we look forward to this weekend!