Will Brown has become one of the Supercars Championship’s most active drivers on social media, not only through his Lucky Dogs podcast but also by giving fans a look into his growing collection of classic cars.
Since first putting out a video last year detailing his then-most recent purchase in a 1989 Nissan Skyline R31 Silhouette GTS, Brown has since posted about his other R31 Skyline, an R34 Skyline, and a 1970 Ford Falcon XW GT-HO Phase II – the latter purchased jointly with his dad, Shane.
While it might seem odd for the long-time Holden- then Chevrolet- and now Ford-associated driver to be amassing a collection of old Nissans – albeit ones with a rich Australian racing history – the connection to the Skyline is surprisingly simple.
“When I was a kid, a gentleman was importing cars and dad was buying them on a grade and picking them up when they got here,” Brown told Torquecafe.
“We used to have anywhere from five to 10 Skylines at our yard back in the day, and we used to take them out to Morgan Park (Raceway), mum and dad would do some laps, and occasionally we’d hop in.
“It’s kind of like my old man with the XWs, that’s what he had when he was young. I can remember mum and dad driving us around in Skylines and those being the fun cars, so that’s why I thought I’m going to buy some of them.”
Brown raised eyebrows when he first announced the purchase of the Silhouette GTS and asked fans online whether he should modify it.
Given the one-of-200 example was in original condition with little more than 8000km on its odometer, he decided to keep it untouched. Enter a two-door R31 GTS-R mock-up.
“Pretty much what happened was I bought that R31 four-door, I wanted to hot something up, I haven’t really done that in my life, I put it up online and everyone’s like, ‘you can’t butcher that one with the history of it’.
“So I was like, oh, fuck it, I’ll go buy another one. I looked online, found this two-door R31, running an RB25, it’s got an R33 rear end in it and he [the previous owner] has done a lot of mods to it.
“I think I’ve had it for about 4 to 6 weeks now, I just got a bit of work done on it getting it registered, then I’ll slowly chip away. It’s more little things on it, but it’s pretty well done.”
The purchase of the two-door R31 GTS-R mock-up coincided with Brown buying another Skyline with work done to it, an R34 GTS-T dressed up to look like a Skyline GT-R but with a circa-700hp (520kW) RB26 engine.
“I bought both of them at the same time and brought them up. The R34 is a pretty nice car with the RB26, it’s way nicer than the red one.
“I just want to walk down to my garage and go, ‘that’s cool’.
“We [the Brown family] used to have a collection of 32 cars before I started racing, and that slowly dwindled down over time to help fund my career. But the plan is to start building it back up, I think we’re back to about 10 cars now and still looking around.
“Dad and I generally, a lot of the stuff – the Skylines, only one of them we have – most of the time we just go halves in our old cars and sort of enjoy them together.”
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