Holden veteran and Bathurst crowd favorite Craig Lowndes has won his sixth Bathurst 1000 title at Mount Panorama this afternoon.
In partnership with co-driver Steven Richards, the pair completed the 161 lap endurance race with just over a second gap with the number 2 position of Ford’s Mark Winterbottom and Steve Owen.
This left the third spot on the podium to Holden’s Garth Tander and Warren Luff.
This is the 13th Bathurst podium for the 41-year-old Lowndes, and his first since 2010. The record 13th podium stands ahead of his mentor Peter Brock and fellow Bathurst Legends Larry Perkins and Jim Richards and his sixth victory has him on par with Mark Skaife.
The record shows that Peter Brock still holds the top title of nine Bathurst wins and Jim Richards with seven (including the highly controversial with with Nissan in the early 1990’s).
A contributing factor for Lowndes win may have been defending V8 series champion Jamie Whincup being dropped from second place to the back of the field with 20 laps remaining after he was given a penalty for passing a safety car which had entered the track following Ford’s Scott Pye crash.
Whincup’s Red Bull team boss Roland Dane said that Whincup had `defied team orders to come into the pits’, and remaining on the track instead. This is the second time that the Red Bull boss has accused him of defying orders following last year’s embarrassment of running out of fuel on the last lap when Whincup ignored pleas to conserve fuel.
Whincup finished 18th at this year’s event, however at one point he led by more than 30 seconds. The penalty and a a lengthy pit stop on lap 106 to address a throttle drama caused him to lose more time than he could recover in the final laps.
V8 series leader Winterbottom did give an extremely gutsy fight after receiving two black flag penalties following electrical problems that disrupted his brake lights.
The team were already without their defending champion Chaz Mostert after his horror qualifying crash on Friday so this was a further challenge to overcome.
Mostert broke a femur wrist and leg in a crash that also injured track-side officials (see more here) .
The bad luck continued to haunt the Ford Falcons on their second last year at Bathurst when the Super Black Racing duo of Andre Heimgartner and Ant Pedersen hit the Mountain Straight wall on lap 36 and were out of the race.
Of course the female duo Harvey Norman race team hit the Forrest’s Elbow wall on lap 15 (see more here). The good news here though, was that the team were able to return to race before the lap 55 deadline to complete the race and avoid a DNF on their record.
Official numbers from V8 Supercars stated that 201,416 spectators were present at Mount Panorama over the four day event which was the second highest attendance on record. We suspect that next year’s event, marking the last for Ford as the manufacturer stops production of the Falcon, will exceed this number.
In total, 5 cars failed to complete the race out of a field of 26 at this year’s event.
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