Matt Brabham might be too busy with Indy Lights to try for a fourth Stadium Super Trucks championship, but that does not mean stadium trucks aren’t in his 2022 plans as he will run the season opener in the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach on 8–10 April. Albeit not full-time, the start marks his eighth year of SST competition.
Brabham has been SST’s top guy since his début in 2015, winning twenty-five races and three championships. The trio of crowns, consecutively from 2019 to 2021 (2020 did not keep standings as a season heavily impacted by COVID-19), are the most of any driver in series history; the third came in dominant fashion as he finished on the podium in all ten races and swept Mid-Ohio’s IndyCar weekend.
At Long Beach, Brabham and Robby Gordon are the only drivers to win thrice with Brabham’s coming once each weekend from 2017 to 2019. In twelve career SST starts at the California street circuit, he has podiums in all but one, and he came close in the exception as he finished fourth in 2018’s Race #1.
He moved to Indy Lights for 2022 with Andretti Autosport, and his second stint there began with a bang as he won at St. Petersburg in his first race. Prior to SST, Brabham was one of the rising prospects in Indy Lights and the Road to Indy ladder with titles in the U.S. F2000 National Championship and what is now Indy Pro 2000. Now with new life in open-wheel racing, he has resumed pursuing his dreams of racing in the NTT IndyCar Series where he last competed in a one-off at the 2016 Indianapolis 500.
Although Indy Lights is his primary focus now, Brabham has been more than open about coming back to SST if the race weekend does not have Indy Lights. He discussed a return when he spoke with The Checkered Flag in early March.
“Racing Indy Lights is going to be hard to make a living and pay the bills because it’s just the way Indy Lights is, so I might have to do a couple of Super Truck races and here and there to kind of keep the bills going and pay and keep the rent up,” Brabham told TCF. “I’ll definitely try and do races that don’t clash. I don’t I could do like a doubleheader weekend, where I race both Trucks and Indy Lights because Indy Lights just takes up all my time, especially on the engineering side, whereas Trucks is a bit easier. I’ll try not to do any of the Truck races that clash and just focus on Lights if that’s on the same weekend, but there’s a possibility of me doing Long Beach in a Super Truck because we don’t have Indy Lights.
“I think I might race Long Beach depending on a few things and do as many races as I can, just to kind of stay busy and I think it helps. If I’m racing every weekend, it’s better than not racing every weekend, right? I got the Super Trucks I can do, maybe a couple of races, and then I’ll also be doing the two-seater IndyCar as well at a couple of events coming up here this month. Definitely going to be busy in between all the Lights stuff, for sure.”
Indy Lights sponsor MasterMine.com will follow him to SST. The cryptocurrency mining business’s colours are blue and yellow, which allows for both of his racing vehicles to be adorned with the same palette as grandfather Sir Jack Brabham‘s Formula One car at the end of his career.
Brabham is the third driver to confirm an entry for Long Beach in the past four days. Last week, Ryan Arciero announced he would compete in the series for the first time while Davey Hamilton Jr. returns after a three-year dormancy to contest the full schedule.
