Shannons Nationals has come and been, and in true MTAQ Racing style, the weekend was as eventful one!

Friday of the race meeting, practice time was quite limited – only 2 x 30 min sessions in total before qualifying Saturday. At a track we only race at once a year, this was going to be quite a challenge.

In the first practice session, we had a front brake pad disintegrate which limited our running – and caused me an anxious moment on the track!  Upon inspection, we found the front pads had crumbled and split (we did check these prior to heading to the track and they looked fine) and spoke with the manufacturer who hasn’t seen anything like it, which requires some further investigation – especially given these are the top-of-the-line race spec pad they produce! The manufacturer is local and great to deal with, and we were able to go and get a replacement set and we were on our way again. Apart from that, the car felt very strong.

Early into the second session, we had a piston ring fail in our engine – which was the engine that has been performing very well this year. Whilst this isn’t a catastrophic failure, it was enough to kill any performance, so we faced a long night ahead. In our inventory at MTA Queensland Head Quarters, we had enough spare components to do a rebuild – so it was back to Head Quarters to start the enormous task of changing and rebuilding the engine.

The boys in the team hooked into the task, and we had the car back and running in the early hours of Saturday morning – although we had to use a lot of road-car standard parts as time didn’t permit fitting all of our race spec goodies – with the majority of the engine coming from our donor car – which was more used to ferrying grandma to the shops and back, so it was about to be in for a shock.

We got back home at around 5am, to be up at 6am to head to the track!

This is the side of the sport that I think characterises it – the human aspect. For most, the fans just see cars flying around a track – but don’t see the herculean efforts required to get some of those cars out there. The easy way out would have just been to park the car for the weekend and give up, however that is not what our team is about. We knew we had a massive job but there was no complaining and we all wanted the car out there to fly the flag for our great sponsors and supporters. A few coffees and some brekky later, the #97 lined up to take its place in Qualifying.

At this point, in my mind, we were already winners. Just to be back out there was an achievement – we had made it!

Without the opportunity to run the car properly prior (aside from a lap of the carpark) we didn’t know what we had. We took a guess at the tune, and missed the mark a bit – which sentenced us to 26th starting spot out of 35. 26th is our worst qualifying ever, but to put this in some context for a moment – the lap we were able to do was almost 1.5 seconds faster than our qualification time at the corresponding event last year – in which we qualified 13th!!  This underlines the enormous rate of development in this class – you can’t stand still. The field was incredibly close.

With Race 1 approaching, we tweaked the tune and got it much better and I was able to sneak in a much needed nap!  Race 1 started very well for us, I was able to nail the start to move into 18th at the end of lap 1, but our horrendous luck continued, with the car having a fuel pump problem which saw us fade out of the race – I was able to nurse the car home for 22nd, which was disappointing given the start we had. We fixed the car, and tuned it again Saturday night – keen to atone on Sunday.

I am happy to say Sunday’s races 2 and 3 went much better. The car’s engine performed splendidly after we tuned it a bit more, and got it in the “window”. These cars are incredibly sensitive to tuning settings, and doing it on the fly is difficult. I was able to move from 22nd to 12th in race 2, but that was about as far forward as I could get. Losing Friday practice started to tell; as we didn’t quite have the handling fined tuned enough to go with the quicker cars in the top ten – we just weren’t fast enough sadly.

Race 3 was more akin to a boxing match – being the TV race, everyone wanted to put on a show. Again we were able to make a handsome start, climbing to 8th a few laps in.  We changed the suspension settings for Race 3 to try and get the handling better, but here I will have to admit I went the wrong direction and didn’t improve it, I actually made it worse – so she was a handful!

We didn’t have the pace to escape the pack and get into the lead group unfortunately. The pack 8th through to 14th was very intense, and we were on the receiving end of some desperado moves – getting pushed off and dropping back to 15th before recovering for 12th.

A pair of 12ths doesn’t even go close to representing the weekend’s incredible effort – considering we haven’t been out of the Top 5 all year. But this was more rewarding on the team front, overcoming our challenges to get the car back was terrific and that is what being a team is all about. On Sunday, our engine repair was well validated with the car running very strongly, which was very, very pleasing and a heartening reward for our all-nighter. With the handling sharpened up, it would have been very fast.

Our next round is about a month and a half away, and we are back in familiar territory at our “home” track, Morgan Park up in Warwick. With a few weeks to fit the rest of our race spec components to our engine, and a few new things we want to try, I am very confident we will be back challenging for wins at a track we always go well at. The rebuilt engine feels like it has a lot of potential, and I can’t wait to get back to Warwick and make up for a poor showing last weekend. We are well overdue for a change in fortunes, and I think Warwick in September will be a great place to start!

A huge thank you to the team and sponsors for their continued support!