The opening article, Composites in Australian Motorsport: Built in Australia, Raced at 300 km/h, sets the scene for the profiles that follow.
My own background sits closer to the water than the track. Vikal International has built marine craft for well over three decades. More recently, Vikal Modular has carried those composite and fabrication skills into modular construction. That same grounding in craft and engineering has drawn us into restoring cars, work built on a similar premise to this edition: precision engineering, sophisticated design constructed with advanced materials and often paired high tech electronics.
On the racetrack, composites are pushed to extremes. Weight, stiffness and durability are not balanced on paper. They are measured on the track, in tenths of a second, and in components that must survive impulsive, dynamic loading events, kerb strikes and bump impacts, layered on top of the steady torsion, bending and shear every chassis carries, without failure. That discipline has pushed our members to invest in fabricating equipment, refine layup, tooling and quality control years ahead of where the same techniques land in broader manufacturing.
This edition profiles the workshops behind that performance. Garry Rogers Motorsport (GRM) shows what in-house manufacturing capability looks like when quality, turnaround and precision cannot be outsourced. Borland Racing Developments, marking forty years of work across three continents, shows the same depth of experience internationally. DY Composites and Sydney Composites, a newer generation of suppliers, bring advanced carbon fibre technology to motorsport components. Renner Auto and Beacham CFE apply current engineering practice to replicate earlier vehicles, work with a familiar shape to my own. Kings Fibreglass rounds out the edition, demonstrating a different application of fibre reinforced manufacturing within the sport.
Alongside these profiles, this issue examines how the composites workforce is built, and where the next generation of laminators, engineers and technicians will come from. Motorsport shows what our industry can achieve at the limit. Training and education sustain it.
Warm regards,
Lynden Vikingur, President, Composites Australia Inc.
