That flash competitive streak was apparently evident during family board games – which he hated losing – and basically any outdoor activity. Brown and his older siblings, Emma and Tim, were into everything as kids, including water-skiing and riding their horses and PeeWee motorbikes. But Brown excelled the most at rugby.

According to Leanne, his first match as a seven-year-old was so successful he had to be hooked at half-time (“he’d scored 13 tries, and the coach said, ‘he’s had enough’”). It wasn’t until he was 13, when a hematoma on a bone in his leg sidelined him for 12 months, that he tried go-karting.

“We went to watch a go-kart event, bought a go-kart the next week, and three months later he won the Queensland state titles,” Shane says. “Then he just got on a run.”

So much so that he caught the attention of Bob Power, the father of IndyCar driver Will Power, who lived up the road from the Browns and still had his son’s Formula Ford cars. He teed up a test day with engineer Brett Francis, Brown blitzed it and was advised to enter the inaugural national junior series, the 2015 Formula 4, due to start in a fortnight’s time.

The category was designed for young drivers hoping to make the jump from karting to Formula 3, and the expectation for Brown – who drove for AGI Sport – was nothing more than experience.

“So we bought a Formula Ford, went to Townsville, and he won his first race when they said it was going to take him 12 months,” Shane says. “We never had a plan. It was just a trip, over a trip, over a trip.”

But the family found that the better Brown performed, the more people were willing to help. With connections, suggestions and equipment. His third place overall in the 2015 F4 earned him the rookie of the year title, and the following year he joined championship-winning team BRM and recorded six race wins and 12 podiums on his way to winning the 2016 championship himself. That same year, he also won the Australian Toyota Racing Series to join an elite few to have done a national double in a single year.

Then came the Supercars Feeder Series, Dunlop Super2 and the Mike Kable Young Gun Award for the best first-year driver, his first season as a full-time driver with Erebus in 2021 and the wins and podiums that followed to get him fourth place in the championship in 2023 and the Red Bull contract for 2024.

Which is how the family ended up here, sitting around a table at the Triple Eight team garages as Brown prepares to contest Saturday afternoon’s top 10 shootout, which confirmed he will start Sunday’s 161-lap epic from fifth position (Brodie Kostecki claimed pole ahead of Cam Waters, Feeney and Richie Stanaway).

Off the track, Brown is into anything and everything mechanical. He has worked at his family’s car yard since before he left school and is integral to the dealership and car-carrying business they jointly own. “He’s not really academic at all,” says Leanne, before Shane clarifies: “He’s not silly or anything, but he was never going to be a doctor or a solicitor.”

The solicitor of the family is Emma, and Tim is a commercial pilot. Brown has followed in the latter’s footsteps, getting his private pilot licence five years ago and buying two light planes. He has flown them (with a pillow to prop him up – he is still short) to races in Townsville, Newcastle and Eastern Creek in western Sydney, and taken Red Bull teammates Broc Feeney and Whincup as passengers to functions in Bundaberg and various other places. He even flew one down to Bathurst earlier this week – a markedly more streamlined journey than the commercial route of Toowoomba-Brisbane-Sydney.

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Brown cheerfully confirms this himself when he briefly pops over to say hello. “Yeah, on Tuesday,” he says, pointing over yonder in the general direction of Bathurst’s airport, before engaging in quickfire parent-son chit-chat.

He and co-driver Scott Pye were flat out on Friday night and didn’t get home until 8.30pm. The track feels fast. He feels good. Leanne’s earrings – guitar picks painted with black-and-white checkers and a red #87 (Will’s car number) – dangle in the breeze as she asks questions. Then he’s gone again, and Shane is left to ponder the future.

“If he could win Bathurst and [effectively seal] the championship, I don’t think any other drivers that I know of have ever done that,” he says. “But anything can happen. We don’t come with expectations after racing for so long. So many things can go wrong here. But fingers crossed, and we’ll either be laughing or crying at the end of the weekend.”

Will there actually be tears? “No … I haven’t seen Will cry since he was four years old. He’s a tough kid.”