The MTAQ Racing Team has safely returned from our first big interstate trip of the year to Bathurst, and whilst it wasn’t our best weekend unfortunately – we certainly far from disgraced ourselves in some fairly elite company.

We had a terrific preparation in the lead up to the event, and felt confident about our chances as we previewed last week. The downside with big events like this, is you are very limited with track time for practice and this year we only had a solitary 20 minute practice session allocated. (For our State Championship rounds, we generally have 6 x 15 minute sessions available to us) so the margin for any error is non existent.

In that practice session, we found that the rear suspension set up we had gone with was far too rigid for the undulations of Mount Panorama, and this was effecting the car’s handling balance on the higher speed corners – making the car something of a handful to drive. Not pleasant when the track is lined with concrete walls!  Even so, we still managed 12th fastest – despite being in heavy traffic. We made a suspension change for qualifying, which was up Friday afternoon.

The change improved, but not fixed, the handling but on our first flying lap the exhaust system blew open at the extractor (this was a brand new exhaust for this season) and robbed us of some critical horsepower – not to mention gave the car a rather tractor-like sound!!!   Even carrying the handicap of the exhaust, I was able to post a very respectable 2:56.09 in clean air, which at that point in the session was 2nd fastest. As the session progressed we chased a “drafting buddy” to give us a slipstream up the straights and try and improve our time, and a few people went quicker and we could not improve due to some traffic. At the end of qualifying, we were a terrific 5th – out qualifying the reigning national champion.

Later in the meeting, it was discovered that 2 of the cars in front of us (From Victoria) had blatantly breached the engine regulations and were excluded from the meeting and sent home. So on the corrected order, we were actually 3rd out of the 53 cars eventually classified.

It was looking good. Very good. The other pleasing aspect about this session was that we had improved our lap time by over 3 seconds from the corresponding qualifying session from 2017, which is a tremendous improvement and validates our hard work in the last 12 months.

During that session, the car started to present a minor gear selection issue – which we looked into and we also set about fixing the broken exhaust system and make further changes to the rear suspension in a bid to improve our speed. We were the last Excel team to leave the track on Friday night, working well past 9pm to give ourselves the best chance for the weekend’s racing.

Saturday morning’s Race 1 looked good for us, with the news of the first disqualification elevating our Starting position to 4th. We made a great start, holding our position on the run up the mountain for the first time and right on the tail of the lead trio.  Unfortunately, going up the towards the top of the hill on that first lap, the gear selection issue returned and left me with no gears – it took what felt like an eternity for the gear to find itself, which thankfully it did. But not before we had dropped back to 18th place.

From there, we really had to put our head down.

Being very gentle with the gearbox, but with our handling and exhaust now absolutely spot on – we charged back through the field, and by lap 4 we had rocketed to 10th, and in the process setting our new Bathurst PB of a 2:55.31 – which was 7 tenths faster than our qualifying time!   Unfortunately there was an accident on that 4th lap and the race had to be stopped. Had it gone the full distance, I think we could have easily got to 6th or 7th.

Now remembering, that this is against some of the best Excel guys in the land!  So it was pleasing to have genuine speed – but highly annoying we had dropped back. We were also significantly faster than our Queensland counterparts, again something that I was personally very pleased with.

Under the rules of the stoppages, the race results are wound back to the order on the last completed lap before the accident – which was lap 3. I crossed the line that lap in 13th (Passing 3 cars on lap 4) so under the rules, we were classified as having finished 13th – meaning that would be our starting spot for Race 2. Again, very annoying!

We attacked the gear selection issue, finding that the car had severed a gear selector cable – so we replaced that for Race 2 and re-adjusted our settings.

Race 2 was held in near darkness Saturday afternoon, with the Race scheduled start time delayed by almost 90 minutes due to an accident clean up in a previous race. This race was hard work, with some very aggressive driving. Due to the fading light, the officials cut the race short at half distance on safety grounds – and we were only able to climb to 10th with our car not working as well in the colder evening air.

We again worked back very late in the night to go back through our Gearbox fix and make further adjustments for Sunday morning’s big final race.  Starting 10th, we made a good jump to slot into 9th on the opening lap. The car was going splendidly, and we were armed to continue our charge from Race 1. There was another accident early in this race, and the race director was forced to deploy the safety car whilst it was cleaned up.

On the restart, our weekend was pretty much killed as I was hit hard from behind and spun around at turn 1. Thankfully the field was able to avoid us, but the car stalled and was very slow in firing back up. When it did, we were dead last and the car was running rough – suggesting the impact and shaken something in the wiring loose, so I decided to retire the car immediately, than risk getting stuck out on the course.

And that was our weekend..

We missed out on that podium we had been chasing, but on the positive, we held our head up very high against the absolute top flight group of Excel racing in the country.

We were the fastest car from Queensland, and when the car was dialled in and functioning as it should, probably the 3rd fastest (Legal) car at the meeting. Considering the competition level – this is a massive achievement. Most of the other teams run multiple cars – whilst we essentially just operate as a single car outfit off on our own. Having multiple cars with a big budget pool, acquiring multiple amounts of data, makes a huge difference in development. So this is very satisfying and shows how far we have come during our journey.

The Bathurst event was also the most intense I have ever seen in my career for rulebook compliance checking. Our class had an entire team of officials dedicated to checking cars to ensure everyone was adhering to the rules – which as it turns out not everyone was. Our car wasn’t left alone – we had numerous visits from the officials over the weekend to check various items, and we were given the thumbs up with our compliance.

From here, we will go back through the car and address anything that we think may cause us a problem going forward. We have shown that we can be very fast now, so we just need to hit the scoreboard at our next event – which is back on home turf for us, Morgan Park in Warwick. It is here we will renew our charge for the Queensland Championship and try and get that well overdue win.

We will have pics and video to come from the meeting and will also advise when Race 3 is due to be shown on TV.

Thank you again for your tremendous support and looking forward to catching up with everyone soon,

David