Will Brown has been mastering a manual transmission since he was eight years old. The model was a Mini, the owner was his mum, and the destination was Prince Henry Drive, a one-way street not far from his family home in the Queensland city of Toowoomba.
“Will would hop in my Mini and head off,” Leanne says. “And people would say, ‘Did you know that Will was driving around?’ He was so short and tiny, so they’d just see this little head. When he was smaller, I used to sit him on my lap, and he’d just steer, and I’d do the gears.”
By the time Brown was 10, he had graduated to turning over the engines of some of the classics his dad Shane – a second-hand car dealer – collected.
“GT Falcons, A9X Toranas, Brock Commodores, Lotus Cortinas,” says Shane. “To keep them all running we’d drive around Prince Henry. One time Will was seen driving a car – he would’ve been 10 years old – and the police came up to the house and said, ‘Your son’s been seen driving’. My dad used to let me drive and ride motorbikes, and I suppose we’ve probably been fairly liberal parents, but it used to happen a lot more. And where we were, you could do that.”
It feels sort of fitting that, many moons ago, the Prince Henry Drive circuit at Middle Ridge was used as a racetrack. Brown, of course, did not know back then that he was already developing his skill set for a Supercars career that could deliver him a maiden championship some 18 years later.
Brown on the podium after race one of the Bathurst 500 in February.Credit: Getty Images
The 26-year-old is fresh off a breakthrough endurance win at last month’s Sandown 500 and leads the series standings by 189 points heading into the Bathurst 1000. A win at Mount Panorama on Sunday would put him in figurative pole position before the final two rounds on the Gold Coast and in Adelaide.
It would be some way to cap his first year with Red Bull Ampol Racing and cement the man known as the “Mayor of Toowoomba” (friends) and “used car salesman by day wannabe Ricky Bobby by weekends!” (Brown’s Instagram bio) as the new headline act of the next Supercars generation stepping into the shoes of veterans and greats such as Jamie Whincup, Shane van Gisbergen and Scott McLaughlin.
Which is refreshing for a down-to-earth larrikin described by his father as “a very likable kid who loves pleasing people … until he pulls a helmet on and hops in the car, then it’s game on”.
Brown as a teenager after winning his first F4 race.
That flash competitive streak was apparently evident during family board games – which he hated losing – and basically any outdoor activity. Brown and his older siblings, Emma and Tim, were into everything as kids, including water-skiing and riding their horses and PeeWee motorbikes. But Brown excelled the most at rugby.
According to Leanne, his first match as a seven-year-old was so successful he had to be hooked at half-time (“he’d scored 13 tries, and the coach said, ‘he’s had enough’”). It wasn’t until he was 13, when a hematoma on a bone in his leg sidelined him for 12 months, that he tried go-karting.
“We went to watch a go-kart event, bought a go-kart the next week, and three months later he won the Queensland state titles,” Shane says. “Then he just got on a run.”
So much so that he caught the attention of Bob Power, the father of IndyCar driver Will Power, who lived up the road from the Browns and still had his son’s Formula Ford cars. He teed up a test day with engineer Brett Francis, Brown blitzed it and was advised to enter the inaugural national junior series, the 2015 Formula 4, due to start in a fortnight’s time.
Brown’s parents, Leanne and Shane, in Red Bull’s garages at Mount Panorama on Saturday.Credit: Emma Kemp
The category was designed for young drivers hoping to make the jump from karting to Formula 3, and the expectation for Brown – who drove for AGI Sport – was nothing more than experience.
“So we bought a Formula Ford, went to Townsville, and he won his first race when they said it was going to take him 12 months,” Shane says. “We never had a plan. It was just a trip, over a trip, over a trip.”
But the family found that the better Brown performed, the more people were willing to help. With connections, suggestions and equipment. His third place overall in the 2015 F4 earned him the rookie of the year title, and the following year he joined championship-winning team BRM and recorded six race wins and 12 podiums on his way to winning the 2016 championship himself. That same year, he also won the Australian Toyota Racing Series to join an elite few to have done a national double in a single year.
Then came the Supercars Feeder Series, Dunlop Super2 and the Mike Kable Young Gun Award for the best first-year driver, his first season as a full-time driver with Erebus in 2021 and the wins and podiums that followed to get him fourth place in the championship in 2023 and the Red Bull contract for 2024.
Brown does a shoey after the Taupo Super400 in New Zealand in April.Credit: Getty Images
Which is how the family ended up here, sitting around a table at the Triple Eight team garages as Brown prepares to contest Saturday afternoon’s top 10 shootout, which confirmed he will start Sunday’s 161-lap epic from fifth position (Brodie Kostecki claimed pole ahead of Cam Waters, Feeney and Richie Stanaway).
Off the track, Brown is into anything and everything mechanical. He has worked at his family’s car yard since before he left school and is integral to the dealership and car-carrying business they jointly own. “He’s not really academic at all,” says Leanne, before Shane clarifies: “He’s not silly or anything, but he was never going to be a doctor or a solicitor.”
The solicitor of the family is Emma, and Tim is a commercial pilot. Brown has followed in the latter’s footsteps, getting his private pilot licence five years ago and buying two light planes. He has flown them (with a pillow to prop him up – he is still short) to races in Townsville, Newcastle and Eastern Creek in western Sydney, and taken Red Bull teammates Broc Feeney and Whincup as passengers to functions in Bundaberg and various other places. He even flew one down to Bathurst earlier this week – a markedly more streamlined journey than the commercial route of Toowoomba-Brisbane-Sydney.
Brown cheerfully confirms this himself when he briefly pops over to say hello. “Yeah, on Tuesday,” he says, pointing over yonder in the general direction of Bathurst’s airport, before engaging in quickfire parent-son chit-chat.
He and co-driver Scott Pye were flat out on Friday night and didn’t get home until 8.30pm. The track feels fast. He feels good. Leanne’s earrings – guitar picks painted with black-and-white checkers and a red #87 (Will’s car number) – dangle in the breeze as she asks questions. Then he’s gone again, and Shane is left to ponder the future.
“If he could win Bathurst and [effectively seal] the championship, I don’t think any other drivers that I know of have ever done that,” he says. “But anything can happen. We don’t come with expectations after racing for so long. So many things can go wrong here. But fingers crossed, and we’ll either be laughing or crying at the end of the weekend.”
Will there actually be tears? “No … I haven’t seen Will cry since he was four years old. He’s a tough kid.”
