Four years is a long time in the air race game, especially when there's no air racing to be done.
When the Red Bull Air Race series went into sabbatical for a refit after the 2010 season, Matt Hall went into caretaker mode; forging a temporary career until recalled to the race track this year.
With the first round of the new series scheduled for Abu Dhabi 28 February-1 March, his MXS racer has been shipped, the team prepared and Hall himself finely tuned. It has been a long time coming indeed, and the Australian is eager for the moment he can launch himself at the course.
"I've trained pretty well, I'm very fit and healthy," he told Australian Flying.
"I've been exercising 2-3 hours per day for the last couple of months. Psychologically I'm feeling quite good.
"I'm as ready as I can be and the team is ready as they can be. If they said 'hey, you've got to go tomorrow' I'd leap at it. I've done really good preparation and I'd hate to come last, but someone has to. I do believe we're going to do much better than that."
When the first aircraft hits the course at Abu Dhabi, Matt Hall Racing will be in better trim than it was for the 2009 or 2010 seasons, the two championships it has contested thus far. The four-year interval has given the team time to plan, practise and prepare.
"When I look back at the other years, each year I raced we took delivery of a new aircraft," Hall recalls.
"The first year it was a brand new aircraft but I was leasing it, the next year it was a brand new aircraft but it was mine, and on both those occasions we got the aircraft flying only a week before we shipped it to the first race. We didn't have any set-up; the way it turned out was the way it was.
"This time I've had this aircraft for four years and modified it substantially over time and I really know it back-to-front now, the technician knows it back-to-front as well."
"We've got a team that's now been working with me for a number of years, whereas previously we started off with a brand new team each year, and they met each other at the first race, so from that side of things it was stressful."
As part of the preparation, the team ran a full race-week dress rehearsal, which involved setting up a track and doing a full race with G-suits and timing and simulating everything the team might have to deal with, right down to pretend media people trying to interrupt Matt. It was all about seeing how the team would react to things over a race week.
At Abu Dhabi, the five-person team will include Matt, technician Eric Cieslar, Team Co-ordinator David Lyall and tactician Peter Wezenbeek. Wezenbeek comes particularly well-credentialed, having helped Formula One driver Fernando Alonso to the 2005 and 2006 World Championships behind the wheel of a Renault. Management oversight will be in the hands of Sqn Ldr (Ret'd) Shawn Matthews, an old air force mate of Hall's.
And Hall has set the team a simple goal: win the RBAR World Championship.
"We want to become the World Champion team, but that's not our goal during the year," Hall stresses, "that's our pre-season goal, and the way we do that is we have a safe, reliable and fast aircraft in that order; we all know our roles in the team, then all we do during the year is take one flight at a time and execute it to our best.
"If someone beats us, but we executed to our best, we should be proud of ourselves.
"So we've finished our plan to be World Champions because the plane has shipped and we've finished our training. Now we're just going to go and execute our best.
"I think we can win a round. It's hard to know because it's a new competition. What's everyone else's plane like? Is my plane fast now with the standard engine?
"I think my plane is going to be competitive. It's my 2010 race plane, and then it was set up terribly, it was a monster to fly. In Perth I was only about 0.2 seconds behind Hannes [Arch] and I beat Paul [Bonhomme], so I think the plane is pretty quick."
There was always a danger that Hall's race craft could have lost its keen edge over the break, but he has never been one to leave a lot to chance, and in his usual way developed a training regime to keep his skills keen.
"I always had belief it was going to come back, sometimes I thought I needed my head read, I thought 'you've only got one life, so stop wasting it'. But I was sure it was going to come back, so I designed all of my display flying around racing.
"I'd do tumbles and torque rolls and these things that are fancy air show manoeuvres, but the heart of every display I gave was racing.
"And what that meant was that every time I did a display I was focused with some pressure, I was doing a prepared sequence with race manoeuvres with pressure in front of an audience, which basically kept my hand in.
"If I wasn't doing that I suspect I would have become quite slack."
Understandably, Matt Hall has been on tenterhooks over the past four years waiting to see if he–or any of them–would ever race again. There were several rumours since 2010, and countless fans asked Matt when RBAR would be back, but until the announcement in October last year, he always had to give indefinite answers.
"It was a long time coming when you're basically putting your life on hold, Hall said."We grew the business to be a profitable aviation business, which is a rare thing on its own. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to be doing with my life, but it was what I needed to be doing if I was going to get back into racing.
"For the first time in my life I was in a holding pattern. For most of my life I've been charging ahead to where I'm going. But it meant I've had a chance to consolidate the team and really learn the current race plane, work with sponsor and know how we all fit together and it actually feels quite relaxing. I'm counting down the days until I leave."