The 2021 sprint car season didn’t feature the greatest string of results for Brian Brown leading into the month of July, leading the long time Knoxville fan favorite to make a change on his race team.
Brown parted ways with long time crew chief Chad Morgan just days before Kings Royal week at Eldora Speedway this year, in favor of a former successful star in Danny Lasoski.
The dividends were felt early on.
“It’s been great,” Brown said. “It’s not just me and Danny, though. (My whole team) has done a good job. Obviously, me and Danny get a lot of the credit, but it takes all of us to be able to do that.”
Brown and his team of Lasoski, Nate Steinhaus, Tye Wolfgang, and Robert Brown put the car out on the track and let it fly.
The No. 21 came back with a top 10 finish in the 37th Kings Royal and also grabbed two podium finishes that could have been wins, too.
After that, Brown came back and got a victory for himself at Knoxville, and then took the All Star Circuit of Champions race at I-70.
The move from Morgan, so far, has given him and his team a bit of a boost.
That’s not to say, though, that Morgan doesn’t know what he’s doing. After all, Brown and Morgan recorded a multitude of second place finishes in the crown jewel race – Brown’s best result in the event.
“After 12 years, I felt like we were kind of just holding each other back,” Brown said. “It felt like time for change.”
Over the past two weeks, Brown says he has taken an approach of figuring things out one race at a time.
He doesn’t want to look ahead at all. He won’t think about his Knoxville Nationals prelim night until the day comes and he rolls out on Thursday.
“If we don’t worry about tonight, we’ll mess it up,” Brown said, before the ASCoC race at Knoxville. “We’ve got to get it going tonight and then after that we can worry about the next race.”
Brown said that it was something that has hindered him in the past.
Now, with an extreme turnaround in results going into the biggest race of the year, he’ll try to capture some of that magic that he delivered during the Nationals back in the day.
“There’s times that I feel like I’ve gotten in front of myself and looking too far down the road,” Brown said. “This isn’t the time of year to do that.”
