We improve the convergence properties of the iterative scheme for solving unconstrained optimisation problems introduced in Petrovic et al. [‘Hybridization of accelerated gradient descent method’, Numer. Algorithms (2017), doi:10.1007/s11075-017-0460-4] by optimising the value of the initial step length parameter in the backtracking line search procedure. We prove the validity of the algorithm and illustrate its advantages by numerical experiments and comparisons.