My advice will probably not be very useful to you, but perhaps to others. I used to have the same problem with following birds and other objects in the sky. The only way to get a clear picture of a fast-moving object is to do panning. As a bonus you also get blurred background.
To set up: zoom in on an object at about the desired image distance and frame as desired. Focus on that (static) object and see what values you get for focus distance, focus depth and hyperfocal. Now set your manual focus, zoom and aperture (raise f-number if possible) to include the estimated depth of field. Half-press shutter to see if the displayed values are what you want.
The trick with high-speed panning is to know your camera well and treat it like a bionic eye
Practice tracking the object at wide angle while keeping it into the center of the frame. Then zoom in, little by little, and practice keeping it centered. It helps to use EVF instead of big LCD.
Remove picture review from menu (default is something like 2 secs) and while tracking either set burst mode or full-press, release to half press, full-press, a.s.o. until you get a set of pictures. Then you can start deleting from that.
As an example I have two photos which have taken about 4 seconds to shoot - that is: grab and switch on camera while removing lenscap, put camera to eye and follow object while zooming in at full tele (12x), half-press to acquire focus, shoot two or three photos if you're lucky while keeping the shutter half-pressed.
Poze Album/Sociale/2008_05_10_Valiug/IMG_6860.JPG/Poze Album/Sociale/2008_05_10_Valiug/IMG_6873.JPG/You can keep the other eye open while viewing through the EVF, might help you acquire the object into frame better.
