Photo: Tayler Burke
Reigning Australian Supercars champion Will Brown will return to single-seaters in the 2025 Formula Regional Oceania Championship.
Brown was Australian Formula 4 champion in 2016, and a frontrunner in Formula Ford. He also won the Toyota 86 title in his homeland that year, leading him towards a future in tin-top racing. He spent four years in the Super2 feeder series before stepping up to the main Supercars championship, and after three seasons with Erebus Motorsport he signed with the Red Bull-backed Triple Eight squad for 2024 to replace NASCAR-bound Shane van Gisbergen and won the title in his first year.
Following in the footsteps of van Gisbergen, who won the New Zealand Grand Prix in 2021, Brown will appear in three of the five FROC rounds in a Giles Motorsport car backed by Red Bull and NextGen, the Tony Quinn-led organisation that has taken over promotion of the championship for 2025.
Quinn is also a Triple Eight shareholder and Brown will race at the three circuits owned by the businessman: Taupo and Hampton Downs, which host the opening two rounds, and Highlands, which stages the finale including the NZ GP.
“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,” Brown 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.
“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.
“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.”
The announcement of Brown follows that of Zack Scoular. The Dubai-based New Zealander, who has raced in United Arab Emirates and British F4 this year, was recently selected as the winner of the Tony Quinn Foundation Scholarship of $70,000 which he will put towards a seat with MTEC Motorsport.