In this note the concept of the tracking time, a measure of the transient behaviour, for model reference control systems is introduced. A model reference composite state feedback control is proposed to guarantee the global exponential stability with any pre-specified convergence rate for a class of model reference control systems with time-varying delay, matched uncertainties and input non-linearity. Moreover, an estimate of the tracking time is derived for such systems. A numerical example is also given to illustrate our main result.