This Year's Bathurst 1000 Provisional Pole Lap Is A Thing Of Beauty

It takes some serious commitment to lay down a fast lap at Mount Panorama circuit. So, on the odd occasion someone manages to get a Supercars machine around in under 2min 4sec, it’s worth sitting up and taking note.

Will Brown, in his debut year in the Australian series as a full-time driver, took a shock provisional pole position at the Bathurst 1000 this week with one such lap. He laid down a stunning 2min 3.898sec effort in his Holden Commodore, which is an absolute joy to watch, even if we don’t have the full, uninterrupted footage just yet.

He was one of only three drivers to drop into the 2.03s in qualifying this year, setting one of the fastest Supercars laps ever seen at the Bathurst 1000 in the process. The fastest qualifying lap remains Scott McLaughlin’s 2:03.559 from 2020, for reference.

Clearly happy with his time, Brown noted: “I said to Tommy [Moore, Brown’s engineer] that I grew some balls out there, had a dip…How good was that? To do a 2m03s around here, I didn’t care if I got pole or not. That’s a pretty wicked time.”

The margins were extremely small, with the top three all clocking times within 0.078sec of each other. This should make for a very exciting Top 10 shootout on Friday afternoon. “I’m glad we’re on the right side of the seven hundredths, it’s going to be tight in the Shootout. I’m ready for it, we’ll have a big crack,” Brown said.