Brown tops Townsville Practice 1 from Hazelwood

WILL Brown has helped Erebus Motorsport draw first blood in Townsville, topping opening practice.

All in all, it was a tame start to proceedings as drivers and teams got to grips with the north Queensland street circuit.

Brown shot to the top well before the halfway mark of the 30-minute session on a 1:13.9706s – an effort that would go unbeaten.

Despite a pre-event parity tweak designed to help the Ford fleet, it was a Chevrolet-dominated leaderboard.

Nine of the top 10 slots belonged to Camaro drivers until the Blanchard Racing Team’s Todd Hazelwood jumped up late into second position.

He remained there, 0.22s adrift of Brown.

Behind the CoolDrive Mustang was Shane van Gisbergen, who again appeared to have some handling complaints with his #97 Red Bull Ampol Camaro.

From there, it was Broc Feeney, Andre Heimgartner, David Reynolds, Mark Winterbottom, Bryce Fullwood, Macauley Jones and Scott Pye.

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One of the few drivers to experience a setback was Thomas Randle, whose new-look #55 Castrol Mustang suffered some early engine gremlins.

Championship leader Brodie Kostecki wound up 11th despite completing a session-low seven laps, including missing the final 10 minutes.

Second and final practice for the Repco Supercars Championship begins at 2:45pm this afternoon.

Results: Practice 1, 2023 NTI Townsville 500