High on the birthday wish list for WPS Racing’s Craig Baird is to put paid to his hard charging ways with some greatly anticipated success in the seventh round of the V8 Supercar Series this weekend at Queensland Raceway.

The New Zealand driver has had a drama charged introduction to the team in 2005 and, after a horrific race incident in his homeland during round two at Pukekohe, he’s slowly bouncing back.

A natural competitive spirit willed Baird into the top ten during practice at Darwin three weeks ago and he realises he’ll need to reproduce this form to be any chance this weekend.

“Even though my birthday falls on Friday I’m happy to put any celebrations on hold until Sunday, but it’s going to be important for us to be on the pace from the outset,” said Baird.

“Hopefully we can make it an even bigger party for WPS Racing and as one of the local hopes we can share the moment with all our fans out at Willowbank.

“We haven’t been setting any unrealistic goals for the team because we are still in the infancy of developing a competitive race package.”

Baird showed last year he’s capable of big things in Ipswich where he qualified in the top 10 before completing the 300-kilometre journey in 17th place.

The talented Kiwi enjoyed a full day of testing at his home circuit last week and approaches this event boasting three successive outings where he has performed above expectations.

“The top rung of drivers this year have been separated by only hundreds and thousandths of a second so it really doesn’t take much to get ourselves up towards the pointy end.

“Once again it’ll be a case of muscling in on a competitive position during qualifying and that’s something we’ve really been working hard towards.

“Unfortunately there were plenty of race incidents in Darwin where we came off second best and a mechanical black flag spoiled what was shaping as a great weekend.

“But again we finished strongly so there’s no reason we can’t put it together this weekend.

“The luxury of a test day has allowed us to work on a few different combinations and there’s no doubt we’ll have a lot quicker car in Queensland.”

Craig Baird Queensland Raceway Record
2004 – Qualified 10th; Race 1: 17th; Overall: 17th
2003 – Qualified 22nd; Race 1: 18th; Overall: 18th
2002 – Qualified 8th; Race 1: DNF; Overall: 34th