"Even my co-driver, Andre Heimgartner, a V8 driver, couldn't catch up with them last season."
So how different a beast is his Audi when juxtaposed with the Porsche he had last year?
"It's got a couple of driver aids such as the ABS braking system, traction control and a pedal shift gear box," says Ellingham who is based in Auckland and works as part of the management team of software company Trust Codes.
The Fastway Racing driver's car is still at the Queensland workshop but it'll be ready for the first race, the Clipsal 500 Adelaide, today in a fleet of 28 cars.
"I've had two trials on it and it's been really good so far so no dramas there. I'm looking forward to giving it a real run in a race."
The Audi, he says, is a lot better on the brakes and enables him to negotiate corners much faster but aerodynamically isn't any faster on the straights.
"The traction control gets you on the throttle much quicker so obviously it doesn't let the wheels spin."
Ellingham will race four rounds of the eight by himself and the others with co-driver Tim Miles, a New Zealander living in Sydney.
"In a four-hour race you need two drivers but in an hour one you don't."
Defending champion Christopher Mief, an Audi factory driver, will provide the yardstick but Ellingham reckons his co-driver, Geoff Emery, an amateur Aussie, will "even things out".
Other pedigree drivers in the series include Aussie Craig Baird (co-driver Scott Taylor) and last year's Bathurst winner, Kiwi Steve Richards (Max Twigg), so he is relishing the thought of finding out where he stands among the big boys.
"But there are a lot of new names in there, too, so you don't know how they are going," he says, aiming to finish among the top five this season.
"It'll take a few races to work up to that because we haven't had a race in our new car yet."
Ellingham says a Dubai company had bought Fastway Couriers but it had decided to retain the sponsorship of the motor racing team.
"They thought it was quite cool to have cars racing."
The Fastway Couriers team is making its first foray into an international event since the brand made its return to Australian motorsport in 2014, after 17 years.
The company last sponsored a team in Australia in the 1997 Bathurst 1000, with a breakdown on the final lap of the race resulting in one of the most incredible displays of sportsmanship in Bathurst history.
Dwayne Bewley prompted international headlines in 1997 when he pushed his Peugeot over the finish line at Bathurst after 161 laps following mechanical problems, agonisingly shy of the chequered flag.
Bewley, working as a sales manager at Euro City in Napier nowadays, was a Fastway Couriers Team driver in Australia who also drove a Mazda Astina in the New Zealand Super Touring Car.
