Brown and Payne exchanged blows at Turn 2 in the opening race of the Repco Supercars Championship at Sydney Motorsport Park.
First, the #888 Red Bull Ampol Ford Mustang barged by the #19 Penrite Ford Mustang, before Payne returned serve a few laps later.
Payne fell shy of the podium in fourth while Brown went on to finish seventh.
Speaking post-race, Brown revealed he suffered wheel damage from one of the hits.
“A bit disappointing, to be honest. We lost a bit of time in the pit stop,” said the Triple Eight driver.
“I think we did a 10-second pit stop, so didn’t get out in front of [Cam] Waters. If I could have got out in front of Cam, I think he was holding everyone up a little bit that had pitted later.
“I reckon it would have been not a bad result there. We probably could have finished third or fourth. It is what it is. We probably weren’t as fast as we wanted to be.
“Probably quite lucky, looking at the rim, that we finished. We got a fair bit of damage on the rim and got a pretty hard hit there. Seventh place, not too bad.”
Brown’s wheels were scant of Dunlop branding and visibly worn by the contact. Payne was arguably worse off, with one of his spokes bent out of place.
Onboard footage from the secondary incident showed Payne suffered a sizeable hit.
When pushed further for comment on the clash, Brown said “he just got rid of me” and foreshadowed some retribution.
“Unfortunately he got it good enough that I couldn’t get him back the next corner, but it’ll come,” he said.
“It is what it is. It’s good, hard racing. We’re all racing hard.
“I was a little bit disappointed. I thought we had a better can than we did just then. I thought we could move forward.
“It seemed hard out there. There’s a bit of [tyre] deg[radation] and it’s very hard to pass.
“We’ll work at it. It’s only the first race of the weekend. We’ll do another two and see where we end up.”
Supercars resumes on Saturday with qualifying for the second race of the weekend at 3:40pm AEDT. Race 2 is scheduled for 7:35pm AEDT.
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