PRESS RELEASE – Will Brown takes third “Rookie of the Round’ award

 

Sunday racing at the Gold Coast Castrol 600 proved just as competitive as the earlier races of the weekend. There were lots of ups and downs during the meeting with the AGI Sport drivers plumbing new highs and lows.

Queenslander Will Brown managed some handy driving in the final race to snag his third “Rookie of the Round’ award. Brown showed plenty of pace in practice however a stalling incident in the first laps of qualifying resulted in a tow-in and he failed to set a flying lap to give him grid positions over the weekend.

Will still got down to business and his final race showed he had come to terms with the gritty Surfers street circuit.

“Had a better race 3 then, started out of ninth due to a pretty bad qualifying, didn’t get to finish.

‘We got a pretty good start, managed to pick two off the start so I got into seventh and just worked our way to fourth and managed to maintain fourth and finish the race.”

Will is showing lots of promise as a young driver who is making huge leaps and bounds in his driving technique and will be one to watch on the sweeping Phillip Island track for the next race weekend.

Following a disappointing Race 2 on Saturday when a failed alternator yanked Tom Grech away from his first race win Sunday proved another unsatisfying result for the Victorian-based racer.

“I started back in sixth position for race 3, unfortunately I didn’t make the most of the start and locked a wheel on one of the opening laps. I couldn’t really do anything about it, I went down the escape road and unfortunately that put us at the back of the pack.”

The young IQ Option Racing driver still keep a positive outlook and shifted focus to the next round straight away.

“So it hasn’t been a fantastic weekend for us but I’ve still loved the circuit and it’s been great driving around.

‘We know we are strong at Phillip island, we’ve always been strong there in testing so I just hope we have a great result there so I’ll just get my head down and focus on that.”

Jimmy Vernon was another driver who felt Sunday could have gone his way but didn’t.

“Race 3 was not the best. The car felt really good but we just had a bit of a gearbox problem and everywhere it was missing gears and not upshifting and downshifting in certain areas.

It’s no ones fault really I think there’s just something wrong inside the gearbox internally and hopefully the boys get the ok to have a look at that and try and fix it for next round.

‘All-in-all our pace apart from that wasn’t too bad in that last race until we made some contact with Will Brown after he passed me.

‘That damaged my front wing quite considerably and made me have to do a pit stop and once you’ve pitted in these short sprint races then your race is pretty much over and I just went back out and rolled around for a few more laps to at least try and gather some championship points but all in all I‘m kinda disappointed at the moment.”

Jimmy still has his sight set firmly on a Championship podium however and the weekend was valuable to his hopes as a whole.

“We banked a lot of points in races 1 & 2 and hopefully Race 3 hasn’t hurt us too much and we will go back and keep chasing the championship going into the last two rounds.

‘Third is still on the table and I can still achieve that. I ran third in the last two rounds this weekend and I’ve proved that I can be there and everything just needs to fall into place. “

It’s getting down to the business end of the season now, the drivers will gather at Phillip Island for the penultimate round of this brand new championship on November 20-22.