Brian Brown Accomplishes A Dream!
Thursday, August 30, 2007
by Bill W – Sprint car driver, Brian Brown, had some big dreams growing up. One was making the Knoxville Nationals Championship lineup, and another was winning the 410 track championship at the Sprint Car Capital of the World. This month, he accomplished both of those feats!
On August 11, he qualified for his first career Knoxville Nationals finale. Not only did he qualify for the race, but he was the event’s hard-charger of the night, driving from his 23rd starting spot to register 13th. When the dust cleared on the Knoxville Raceway last Saturday night, Brian had accumulated enough points to clinch his first ever Knoxville Nationals 410 sprint car track championship!
Driving the Tim and Gina Doogs #21, Brian says a mediocre time trial was not a big deal. “In qualifying, we drew a late number, and we had one of the better times of those cars that went out late (9th quick). As far as the feature invert (12), that worked out well for us. The important thing about qualifying well at Knoxville lies in the points. Every point counts, but last weekend, our time trial ended up playing to our favor.”
After running second in his heat event, Brian staged outside of row two for the 20-lap feature event. “My car really wasn’t too good for the feature,” he says. “We were pretty loose, and I was spinning the tires pretty bad. I’m not the easiest driver on tires. Usually, I’m known to blister left rears before anyone, and when we had the red on lap nine, I looked at the left rear and it was already blistered.”
Brian worked his way by Jack Dover early on for second behind leader, Dion Hindi. On lap nine, Dover got upside down, bringing out the red flag. During the stoppage, the strategy for a title began to play out for the Grain Valley, Missouri driver. “(Dusty) Zomer (second place in points) was pretty far back, so I didn’t want to blow the tire, fall out, and put the points back in his hands. We kind of cruised around the last eleven laps. If the opportunity presented itself to take the lead, we would have, but if not…if someone came along and wanted second, we probably wouldn’t have crashed to keep it. I guess you could say we were point racing at that point.”
Brian did settle for second behind Hindi in the end. He is extremely thankful for his opportunity to live out his dream of a Knoxville title. “It’s been a lifelong dream come true to do that,” he says. “It’s something we’re really proud of, and in 30 or 40 years, they won’t be able to take it away from us! It takes a whole team to do it. You can have the best driver in the world or the best team in the world, but if you don’t have the combination working together, you’ll never accomplish what we did. This was the goal we set out to do, and we got it done.”
Realizing what has happened will take awhile for Brian. “It will probably sink in, come banquet time, when we see our car on display at the banquet at Terrible’s Casino. We’ll get to celebrate that night.”
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