Will Brown is finally getting to “have a go” at NASCAR racing this weekend at Sonoma Raceway.
“It’s cool to come over here,” Brown said Friday. “Watching what SVG (Shane van Gisbergen) did last year, a lot of Aussies have paid a lot of attention to NASCAR now and I’m pretty excited to come over and have a go. I was lucky enough to put a deal together with Richard (Childress) — we were able to have him out to Australia at the end of last year and made that connection.”
Brown is in a third Childress entry for the Cup Series race, piloting the No. 33 Chevrolet. Austin Dillon and Kyle Busch, the organization’s primary drivers, are well familiar with Brown as the three have competed together in an endurance race during the winter.
“It was cool to put a deal together last minute,” Brown said of competing in the Toyota/Save Mart 350. “Hopefully we’ll have a good weekend.”
The Toowoomba, Australia native currently leads the Supercars Championship point standings. Cup cars and Supercars are similar, but Brown will adjust to shifting with his right hand all weekend.
[lawrence-auto-related count=3 category=1428]
He has, however, been getting as up-to-speed as possible in the simulator. It started with an hour three weeks ago when he came to the United States, where he used the sim to familiarize himself with Sonoma. This week Brown piggybacked off Dillon’s simulator time to get another hour and then took Busch’s entire scheduled session when the two-time NASCAR champion was in Indianapolis for the Goodyear tire test.
“That’s something we don’t use back at home,” Brown said. “There are no simulators. We can use a cheaper sort of one in our house, but we don’t have that sort of facility or infrastructure. It was cool to get on it. I think we had a really good simulator session…the last time on Wednesday, and I seem to know the track pretty well.”
Brown is reserving his expectations for the weekend until after getting through practice and qualifying. It doesn’t go unnoticed what van Gisbergen has done since he arrived in NASCAR, starting with a win out of the gate last year in Chicago.
“Shane…doing what he did makes it hard for the Aussies to come out now,” Brown said. “It’s like a letdown if we don’t win. I think Shane’s been running inside the top 10 for his last couple of road course runs, so that would be great if we could do that.”
Brown was third fastest in Friday’s Cup Series practice session.