While teammate Broc Feeney swept to a hat trick of pole positions and race wins at Hidden Valley, Brown failed to qualify inside the top 10 for any of the races.

He was 14th, 17th and 11th in the respective qualifying sessions and largely at a loss to explain the deficit to Feeney.

Brown was still a force to be reckoned with in the races, ending up as the fourth highest points scorer for the weekend with results of eighth, seventh and fifth.

However, it’s clear that Brown – who faced a small qualifying deficit to Feeney last season – won’t be able to defend his crown unless he ups his one-lap game.

“[We] just need to take a look at our side of the garage,” said Brown following the weekend.

“We never felt like we were this far off Broc at any stage last year.

“We felt like we probably could’ve edged a little bit ahead or at least held our own with Broc and [we] both have very competitive cars this year.

“But right now we probably feel like after the last three or four rounds we haven’t really been there.”

Brown is about to depart to the United States to prepare for his NASCAR Cup Series outing with Kaulig Racing at the Chicago street course on July 6.

He’s heading over early to prepare but will face a tight turnaround upon return ahead of the Townsville 500 on July 11-13.

Brown will also work with his Triple Eight Supercars engineer, Andrew Edwards, in Chicago as they aim to repeat the success ‘AE’ achieved at the event with Shane van Gisbergen in 2023.

Supercars champ facing tight NASCAR turnaround

“I’m pretty keen just to get over to Chicago and have a reset, to be honest,” Brown added.

“I look at it as a holiday, get to go over and race in NASCAR, enjoy myself, have a little bit of time off from this and work and all those things.

“So looking forward to getting over there, doing a reset and coming back strong for Townsville.”

Triple Eight team manager Mark Dutton said there were no immediate signs that Brown’s Camaro has been carrying an issue that would impact its qualifying speed.

However, the team will investigate as part of its bid to turn Brown’s form.

“We’ll go digging just because you know Will can qualify extremely well and we saw that last year where he was super strong,” Dutton told Speedcafe.

“This year we haven’t really had the one-lap pace from Will often enough, that’s his words, and Andrew’s.

“For us, when one car is qualifying a lot differently to the other car, you need to investigate. It’s as simple as that.

“We’ve got faith and confidence that both our drivers can nail it so if they’re not, we need to see if there’s some underlying reason behind it.”

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