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Will Brown’s pole position in the Penrite Oil Sandown 500 feels even better in light of his struggles in the previous event of the Supercars season at The Bend.
The Erebus Motorsport driver prevailed in the Top 10 Shootout by a margin of almost two tenths of a second over team-mate Brodie Kostecki, to put the #9 Coca-Cola Camaro into first position on the starting grid tomorrow.
It is a stark contrast to his performance four weeks earlier, when he was a non-finisher in one race after a first-corner crunch, had an off in another, and qualified no higher than eighth all weekend.
Brown admitted then, in the days following confirmation of his move to Triple Eight Race Engineering at season’s end, that his headspace was not optimal, but he was naturally in a better mood today at Sandown.
“It’s nice to not be a second off Brodie this weekend, so that’s good,” quipped the Queenslander.
“But yeah, it means a lot. Tailem Bend was a tough round, crashing out in the first one and then made a couple of mistakes in the other ones.
“So, to come back and get pole position’s really exciting and probably makes it that little bit better as well.
“Hopefully we can piece it together. The enduros, you sort of put them on their own pedestal and you want to win the Sandown 500, you want to win the Bathurst 1000, but it also goes towards your points at the end of the year.
“So, it’d be good if we can finish right up there and get a fair few points from this.”
Co-driver Jack Perkins is set to take starting duties tomorrow, 25 years on from father Larry’s last victory in the Sandown 500, and on a weekend when his Erebus Super2 entry is running in retro livery matching that with which ‘LP’ won the 1993 Bathurst 1000.
“It would be an awesome feeling [to win], obviously, but I don’t get ahead of myself,” said Perkins junior.
“I’ve got to do a pretty big job tomorrow, no mistakes and we’ve been working very hard this year to be in this position.
“So, I’m not going to let myself get there because we’ve got a fair bit to do before that could happen.
“I’ll just execute my role, know what I’ve got to do, and hopefully it pays dividends.”
The Warm Up starts tomorrow at 10:10 local time/AEST.
