Brown was 'arguing with myself' in Kostecki battle

Will Brown admits he was "arguing with myself" amid his dramatic battle with Brodie Kostecki, which ended with the Red Bull Ampol Ford spinning in front of the field.

Brown was eliminated from Finals contention at the Penrite Oil Sandown 500, but for a time, appeared in the box seat to win his way to a second consecutive Grand Final.

The 2024 Supercars champion emerged in the lead in the Sandown opener after the first round of stops, but came under series attack from Shell V-Power Racing Team star Kostecki.

On lap 36, Kostecki made his move at Turn 1. Kostecki ran wide but retained track position into Turn 2, but still under assault from Brown. In a desperate attempt to get back down the inside at Turn 4, Brown locked his brakes and spun out. All told, it was yet another battle that fell the way of Kostecki.

Speaking on his Lucky Dogs podcast, Brown conceded he was in a battle within his own helmet as to how he would play the battle, having believed he had enough to keep the #17 Mustang behind.

"I came out of Dandenong Road, got through Sector 1 onto the back straight, I look up and it's like, you've caught me by six tenths,” Brown said.

"I'm like, 'Oh, shit… okay, I don't have the pace I need’. And this is really when I was fighting with myself, and like I say, maybe ego took over.

"All before that, I was like, 'Okay, I'm doing the right things. I'm trying to cook his tyres’. When you were catching me by that much, I was really going in my head, and I was nearly going to ask the team what I should do.

"I was really arguing with myself as to what to do there. And then I thought, 'Nah, let's get into it’. It just took over.”

Writing in his Supercars.com column, Craig Lowndes said: "I don't want to be too harsh on Will, but Brodie has had the upper hand on him for quite some time. Yes, they’re mates and yes, they do their podcast together. Will was looking to square it up, and it didn’t work out."

Brown, though, maintains his move at Turn 4 wasn't in direct response to how he would race Kostecki versus any other driver on the grid, and insisted he was trying to avoid hitting the Shell Ford.

“As I've gone to throw it in there, I've noticed that I'm in too fast, it's not much grip,” Brown said.

“My two options were… and at this time it wasn’t that it was you, it was that I'm going to absolutely annihilate you, and try and use you to stop, or I've got to try prop it up and not take us both out.

"And as I've propped it and put, it's pitched a lot, locked the rears. Really, like I say, it wasn't at all who it was or that, but you have this weird moment where you go, 'Oh, I don't actually just want to fence a car,' like fence a competitor.

"So I was trying to prop it up and then I spun it myself… generally it's hard to spin it yourself, but as it locked rears, it just rotated. So that was the great battle of the year over with me just backwards sitting there."

Critically, Brown — who after the weekend, said he deserved to be eliminated — admitted his #888 Ford's tyre life struggles would have caught up with him anyway. Come Sunday, he qualified 19th, all but ending his faint hopes.

“If I had enough grip on the inside there, I probably could have got up the inside enough of you to rub you up and then get [a] side draft down [to] Turn 6,” Brown said.

“Now thinking about it, you would've passed me somewhere else. And then in hindsight, I didn't know that our tyre life was so bad. Broc dropped from third to 12th.

“Ultimately at the end of the day, I think I probably would've finished 10th anyway with the speed we had."