Supercars Champion to join Castrol Toyota FR grid

Supercars champion Will Brown will step back into single seaters in January as he continues a personal challenge to prove he can compete against and beat the best in any motorsport category in the world.

Brown will race a Red Bull and NextGen-supported Toyota FT-60 in three rounds of the forthcoming 2025 Castrol Toyota Formula Regional Oceania Championship, fulfilling a long-held desire to compete in the series.

All three appearances will be at Triple Eight Race Engineering shareholder Tony Quinn’s New Zealand tracks. That means Brown will be in action in the first two rounds at Taupo International Motorsport Park and Hampton Downs before racing in the season finale, the 69th New Zealand Grand Prix at Highlands Motorsport Park.

Although comparison to Shane van Gisbergen’s famous win as the reigning Supercars champion in a Red Bull-backed car in the 2021 New Zealand Grand Prix will be inevitable, Brown says his surprise inclusion in the championship is more about exploring his own abilities as a racing driver.

“Single seaters are a bit of an itch I want to scratch and there’s no better place to do it than in this championship,” he said. “I was watching Formula 2 and Formula 3 races earlier this year and thought it would be great to race in a competitive field of single seaters once again.”

Brown wanted to compete in the championship as far back as 2017 but couldn’t quite pull the right deal together. That all changed this year.

“When Tony’s organisation took over the promotion of the major New Zealand championships, the desire to have another go started to look like a much more realistic possibility. I’m delighted to be part of those three weekends and am looking forward to some excellent racing.

“I’m not coming to take part, I’m coming to New Zealand to win. It’s no different to why I have wanted to try NASCAR and TCR. As a racing driver I want to test myself against the best and I know this championship has a fantastic record of helping produce some world class drivers.”

A full field of 20 cars is expected for the 2025 championship, the first time since the pre-Covid 2020 season. That year the championship included no fewer than three current Formula One drivers in Liam Lawson. Yuki Tsunoda and Franco Colapinto. Graduates and title winners also include Lando Norris and Lance Stroll and from Supercars, Thomas Randle and Matt Payne. The 2025 Castrol Toyota FR Oceania Championship will also be running as one of the lead categories in the brand new premier motorsport summer series, the NextGen Motorsport Championship.

Brown will join Giles Motorsport for his three big weekends – one of the four teams who run all of the drivers during the championship’s five weekends. He’ll be in good hands. Team principal Stephen Giles was chief engineer to Mika Häkkinen in his two F1 world championship winning seasons of 1998 and 1999.

Like the vast majority of top single seater racers around the world, Brown followed the ‘classic’ route in motorsport, competing in karts from the age of 13 before switching to circuit racing and winning the Australian Formula Ford Championship and the Formula 4 Championship in 2016.

He won the Australian Toyota 86 Championship the same year and that proved a turning point as he headed down the tin top route on a trajectory to Supercars. But despite his phenomenal success in Australia’s main game, he’s never lost the appetite for driving fast open-wheeled racing cars.

His last appearance in single seaters was in the Australian S5000 series in 2019 where he took on the likes of Rubens Barrichello, but Brown says he’ll be ready to fight at the front.

“Hopefully I’ll be able to get some testing in a single seater at some stage, but I know Taupo well from Supercars, I’ve done some laps at Hampton Downs in a Toyota 86 and I’ve done a few laps at Highlands as well, so the tracks will not be new to me.”