Tyres a key part in Triple Eight battle
By Thomas Miles
Date posted: 16 July 2025
At one point, there was the prospect of a teammate tussle for victory in the Townsville 500 finale won by Broc Feeney, but there was a good reason why Will Brown faded late.
Feeney took a 10th win of his impressive 2025 Sprint Cup campaign by what appears to be a comfortable margin of 3s over teammate Brown, but that did not tell the full story.
Starting down in seventh, Brown made good ground early, picking off Davison, Randle and De Pasquale before the first round of stops and working his way to an effective second after Tickford tried the undercut with Waters.
Despite Feeney having calmly controlled the entire race, Brown’s pace was clear and he tried to carry on his momentum and slowly started gaining on his teammate.
With nine laps left he even caught the bumper of the #88, but drifted back towards the end.
Brown was desperate for success, having only beaten his teammate once in the last 14 races.
He have it a crack, but in the end he ran out of time and grip.
“I probably had a better car than where I ended up in qualifying and when that happens it just puts you back in the pack and then I had to do so much work to get back to Broc who’s at the front,” Brown said.
“I really wanted to try and win a race just for my side of the garage but in trying as hard as I did to get there I just burnt my tyres up.
“So I just feel like it’s been a tough couple of rounds. It is great to get back on the podium but I’ve still got a bit of work to do. We’ll keep building and we are trending up.”
Brown even asked the team to perform a cheeky undercut which was denied before being forced to settle for second.
“Broc wanted to win and Will’s going, ‘well, I want to win this thing. Can we undercut? Or what can we do to beat #88?’” Whincup explained.
“But at the same time, you don’t want both screwing each other over racing too hard to then get done by Chaz or Cam.
“The drivers are entitled to ask what they want. And we’ve got a fantastic engineering group that handle it back at base.”
Brown was not too concerned in the end.
“It is what it is,” he told Fox Sports
“Unfortunately, they’ve got pit preference. I wanted to go a little bit early, and the team said, ‘no, we’ll let them go when they want to go’.
“I really wanted to try and win a race just for my side of the garage but in trying as hard as I did to get there I just burnt my tyres up.”
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