Brown's false Bathurst dawn after epic first stint

Will Brown admitted he got his hopes up for Bathurst boilover after starting 17th, with the #9 Coca-Cola Camaro chewing though the pack in the first stint.

Erebus Motorsport was the only team to get both cars in the top 10 in Sunday’s Repco Bathurst 1000, with Brown/Jack Perkins eighth behind Brodie Kostecki/David Russell in second.

The championship leaders were also the only team to get both cars in the top 10 in both Sandown and Bathurst enduros, with Kostecki/Russell second and Brown/Perkins fourth at Sandown.

Where the #99 had a dominant run to Sunday, the #9 had a troubled lead-in with Brown crashing in Friday qualifying. Erebus managed to repair the car, but Brown could do no better than 17th.

Sunday’s race started with mix of co-drivers and main drivers, with Brown gaining a staggering 12 positions before handing the #9 over to Perkins in fifth. Such was the early race pace in the #9, that Brown set the fastest lap of the entire race on lap 4.

A second Safety Car on lap 40 resulted in a double stack, which dropped Brown to 14th for the restart. Perkins took over again before Brown got in on lap 84, and rejoined 11th.

Brown lost a combined 132 points to Kostecki over the two enduros, and is now 390 points behind his teammate with two rounds and 600 points remaining.

“That first stint got my hopes up, I thought, ‘Geez we’ve got a fast car’,” Brown said on Supercars Trackside after the race. “We were coming through the pack, I think we got up to fourth, then we chucked Jack in and double-stinted him.

“I jumped back in to do about 80 laps home, which was a long way. I'm sure where we went wrong, to be honest.

“I thought we were in fourth, I thought that was where we were gonna come. We lost 25 seconds in pit lane, which is fuel time, taking longer in pit lane to cars around us.

“I raced [James] Courtney all day, I thought we were lapping him, turns out he was ahead of me. We’ll look at that in debrief, we still moved forward along the way.”

It was a mixed weekend for 2019 podium-finisher Perkins, who sat out the Dunlop Series finale to focus on Sunday’s Great Race. However, the Perkins family did enjoy a special moment, with Larry lapping the restored 1993 Bathurst-winning Commodore.

“Watching Will carve through the field, we were licking our lips there in the early stages of the race,” Perkins added.

“That double stack hurt us to begin with, then just kept getting boxed around a bit and didn’t have the ultimate pace.

“Did four stints straight in my run, so that was a long stint. We had to reverse window it home from there."