behind the scenes

Round 2 preview

17th May 2025

Author: tom

Before every round of the season, I do an exclusive preview for my Partners. Its an insight into behind the scenes of our operation which is something that people don’t often get to see. Normally all we get to see is what social media allows us to, which is short clips of the weekend and of-course the results, but its such a tiny fragment of the story and all the effort that goes in. I wanted to extend these previews out to our supporters and others that might be interested in an effort to connect more and give an unfiltered look into team TMM.

Motorsport has lots of tiny moving pieces, even at a relatively grassroots level such as Excels. There are different challenges depending on which way as a racing driver you choose to approach the sport. For us, we’ve gone down the road of building, running and funding the racecar ourselves because its cheaper, but does require a massive time commitment and is still expensive in its own right.

Just to give you an overview of what exactly that entails, its things like developing the car to extract half a tenth here, and half a tenth there. Often that development is done through extreme attention to detail and with several tiny changes to the car which may or may not work, so you need to test it as well. Sometimes you’ll actually take a step backwards even after ten’s of hours of work, and you have to rapidly accept that and try something new. You’re constantly learning and evaluating and I’ve discovered just how adaptable you need to be if you want to run a car yourself in this category.

We’re constantly managing our finances and making a choice to allocate our resources towards the most important performance defining things and not towards optional luxuries. We’re communicating with our partners and coming up with new ways to better represent them and over deliver. Always working to form new partnerships and bring in more funding. Reviewing our performances and asking what we could have done better, reviewing footage, data and an absolute shit load of brainstorming. Often I just spend hours sitting in the racecar or at the computer with some music in the background coming up with ideas, some good and some bad. I could honestly go on forever and fill up 20 pages with all the miniscule, time consuming things that it requires for us to even touch a racetrack in the first place. Its a huge task for just 2 people, sometimes I really do feel like we’re doing the work of 10 people. Name another sport that even comes close in that regard, it doens’t exist.

Now, with that in mind you can imagine how gutted I was after our brand new coil pack decided approximately 4 sessions was enough and failed on the pre-grid of Race 1 after we’d just qualified a tidy P5. This sport is ruthless and doesn’t take any prisoners, even in Excels. So much of your result can be dictated by items not in your control. I felt the recovery after that early setback was solid, but honestly I lacked confidence at the high speed due to rear instability all weekend which really affected our pace as well. Our relative speed was actually quite strong at the beginning of the weekend, the 31.2 I punched out in Qualy was a pretty average lap where I got baulked at the final corner and didn’t have a tow - yet we were somehow only 4 tenths off pole. After that though we gradually fell off and our true pace was somewhere around P6-P8. It was perplexing because the same setup had performed beautifully during pre season, and I was happy with the balance.

Queensland Raceway is a very basic racetrack on paper, its 6 corners and mostly straights. The mighty Excel is pumping out a whopping 90-100HP and the top speed is roughly 170-175kmp\h depending on if you have a tow or not. Because the cars are so woefully underpowered and the straights are pretty long, your minimum speed and the exit of the corners are crucial and your engine development as a whole is extremely important. If you’re off by a few kmp/h you will definitely feel it in a major way. In pre-season testing, the car was sublime over 1 lap and I had quite a lot of confidence heading into Round 1. We’d made some extreme headway with the car and found over 8 tenths of a second during the off season. However, something we hadn’t tested was what the car was like under race conditions, in an angry pack of cars and being fed dirty air.

When you’re nose to tail in a train of 7-8 cars lap after lap, everything heats up. Water, oil, brakes, your brain, all of it. During Round 1 this year the car was woeful once it got hot and throughout the weekend we actually went backwards in terms of car speed. I’d focused such a huge amount of energy extracting the ultimate 1 lap pace out of the thing, I’d almost completely forgot that we also have to race it. That was a big wake up call and over the last 4 weeks I’ve done almost nothing but develop this area. Just looking down at my list of changes and development, there’s a total of 13 changes to the car and easily 50-60 hours worth of time investment in only a 4 week period. Not easy when you’re working full time.

Looking at things in a more positive light as my Mother would tell me to, we’re only 1 round into 6 for the year. We have a completely straight car. 4 top ten results, a growing list of incredible partners that its our pleasure to represent and we have a very clear direction of improvement. Failure after all is an essential part of the process and you cannot have the peaks without the valleys. Round 1 overall I feel was a success, we just have a few things to tweak. If we can extract anything like the pre-season speed we had, It’ll be a good rest of the season.

Eyes forward.

T.M