Will Brown has unfinished business in the United States.
The Reigning Australian Supercars champion made his NASCAR Cup Series debut last year at Sonoma Raceway and was immediately amongst the fastest in practice without having ever driven the car.
Then came qualifying where electrical gremlins negated a potential pole winning effort. Those issues continued into the race. Brown never really had a chance to show what he was capable of after teasing the potential of following Shane Van Gisbergen as a surprise Cup winner from Oz.
“Yeah, last year was a little bit disappointing with the electrical gremlins but it made me want to back more to be honest,” Brown said on Tuesday during a NASCAR media call. “We didn’t get the result we wanted last year and I think Chicago is an event a lot of drivers want to do, especially here in Australia.
“Street courses are some of our biggest events over here. We do a lot of them over the year. So, when it popped on the schedule and Shane won that event, it was something a lot of wanted to come over and put a deal together to come race this year.”
That is how Brown came to put a deal together with Kaulig Racing to drive the No. 13 after his initial foray with Richard Childress Racing last summer. His reasons to want to come here are three-fold:
- The history and prestige of NASCAR
- Street course racing is familiar
- And the NextGen is a similar platform to Supercars
“It’s more about the history of NASCAR,” Brown said. “The racing is similar to what we do and I think the cars have gotten more similar after I went over there last year and competed, and also our new Gen-4 cars over here are similar to you don’t have to adapt too much.”
Brown concedes that it is, in his words, ‘cheating’ for the Supercars drivers to come over to the United States just to run in the familiarity of road and street course races but that also it’s most viable for their sponsors too.
He wants to run ovals like fellow countryman Brodie Kostecki did in his formative years as a Late Model driver in the Carolinas. He wants to run some Truck Series races like Cam Waters. It just has to make business sense too.
“I think the biggest thing for us realistically is that it comes down to sponsors and support and hopefully for myself, I can have a good run at Chicago and my sponsors would support a Truck or Xfinity start on an oval,” Brown said. “But it’s hard to get the support and sponsors to run an oval straight away because we are going to struggle in the first one. The sponsorship is probably the difficult part.”
To wit, Brown says he has a lot of respect for NASCAR oval racing, especially watching Van Gisbergen adapt over the past year and a half, and not always comfortably.
“I think it’s shown how competitive those guys are over there and how difficult the ovals are,” Brown said. “There is a lot to learn. I’ve been watching nearly every race. They’re on Monday morning each time for us so I watch most of them. It’s extremely difficult.
“He had some good runs last year and looked competitive on Sunday in the Coca-Cola 600. Hopefully he picks it up and continues to get more competitive. It’s just that we’ve done road racing since we were in karts and ovals are what drivers do over there since they were karts.
“It’s just hard to get up to scratch within a year and battle with those guys.”
So, the obvious question is if Brown wants to do that too.
Brown says he’s really happy where he is, especially since he took over for Van Gisbergen at Triple Eight Race Engineering.
“I was happy to see him go,” Brown said with a laugh. “I have a great team around me at Red Bull Ampol so you never know until the offer gets put in front of me what that opportunity is.
“But coming back and doing Chicago is just about scratching an itch and competing against some of the best in the world. I want to do the Aussies proud but I wouldn’t know unless it was ever presented to me.”
