THIS WEEKEND is the end of the era for Australian motorsport, with Craig Lowndes taking on his final solo Supercars event on the streets of Newcastle.

As you’ve seen elsewhere on the internet lately, there is a lot of awesome CL themed content getting around, so why not add to the conversation with some cool stories from the man himself?

The Race Torque’s Mark Walker was fortunate to sit down with Craig for an hour with a selection of SACHS/ZF Services Australia customers earlier this year at Triple 8 Race Engineering’s headquarters:

Here’s what the great man had to say in a wide-ranging chat about his Bathurst debut, challenging times in Europe, that F1 experience at Bathurst and much, much more..

MARK WALKER- Rewinding to your first Bathurst 1000 in 1994 in the HRT VP Commodore, how much has the event and the cars changed in that time? It’s more of a flat-out sprint now.

CL- It wasn’t too far off it back then, to be honest. The cars mechanically have got a lot stronger, and the safety of the cars has improved immensely since then too. Obviously, things have evolved, you now need two strong drivers now, you can’t just have a co-driver coming along for the ride any more. It was my first year when we finished second behind Dick (Johnson) and (John) Bowie. Me being in the car at the end was a mistake, I wasn’t supposed to be in the car at that point. I was the rookie, I was the junior, the problem was that Brad had done his time in the car, which meant I had to get back in. I was nervous because it was my first time at Bathurst and I didn’t want to crash it, I then wound up leading the race for a lap and a half, and that was effectively the start of my career.

MW- You alluded to your career defining move around the outside of John Bowe at Bathurst in ’94, fast forward, you wind up winning the Bathurst 12 Hour with him in 2014.

CL- Yeah! The funny story – I drove at the 12 Hour with Bowie in a naturally aspirated Ferrari 458, in difference to what I drove with Jamie (Whincup) in the twin-turbo Ferrari 488 in ‘17. At Bathurst in 2014, Bowie and I were having a chat about the ’94 1000 when I was chasing him in the closing stages. Before that, Brad (Jones) came in for the final stop about two laps too early, so we had a fuel calculation to run to the end. So I chased down Bowie, led for a lap and a half, I got caught up with a back marker, he passed me back, then I was starting to close the gap again, but my fuel light came on, so the team told me to back off… I had enough of a gap back to third, so I could basically bring it home in second. What Bowie told me is that they were in the same position, they were running out of fuel as well, so we both limped across the line – he was thankful that we yielded first and took the pressure off, otherwise it could have been a different scenario. Back to the 12 Hour, it was nice to drive with Bowie, there were four of us (with Mika Salo and Peter Edwards), so it was easier than the win with Jamie and Toni Vilander.

MW- Do you see yourself driving more GT races, more overseas events in the future?

CL- I’d like to. One race that I haven’t been able to do but I’d like to is the Le Mans 24 Hour, but it has always clashed with our local racing. Off the back of winning Bathurst here in the 458, we went over and did the Spa 24 Hour, once again four drivers, and we were classified Pro-Am, which meant that we had three pro drivers and one amateur. We wound up coming home third in our class, and I think eighth overall from memory, and that was the first time I’ve done a 24-hour race. You talk to people, and you either love it or hate it… and I loved it.

MW- You had to think about that!

CL- Only because I had to do all the night driving! Out of the four drivers we had, the two other pros hated driving at night, so my stint was all through the night. I got in the car at 8:00pm, and I did a double stint, I got out of the car for an hour sleep at 11pm, I then did another double stint until the sun came up, and my day was done. The thing with the Ferrari, which I didn’t appreciate but I do now, some headlights are set up for distance, but the Ferrari had more of a wide angle. Going down through Eau Rouge, it was semi-flat in the Ferrari, and coming up the Kemmel Straight you couldn’t see anything until you saw the Armco at Les Combes for a braking marker… hence why the other drivers didn’t want a part of it!

MW- How was the sleep after that?

CL- Because we were on the podium, we were up until about midnight the following the race, then I collapsed, I think I slept all the way home!

MW- Good jetlag cheat, I’ll keep that in mind…

CL- It was a good experience, I’d like to do it again, I’d like to be in a car with three pro drivers, and that would be more difficult with rotation all the time.

MW- Favourite win from your 100 plus victories?

CL- Bathurst ’06. Peter Brock was my mentor, but the reason I became a motor mechanic and a race driver was because of my father. My Dad (Frank Lowndes) was a part of the Holden Dealer Team in the late 1960s early ‘70s more as a mechanical engineer, so that was what got me into the sport. Dad was involved in the build of Cortina, Monaros and XU-1s, so for me I did my apprenticeship with my Dad – they say you should never work with your parents… I’d go off to trade school, then I’d come home and he’d do things the old school way, and we’d butt heads. Brock was a good mentor when I first got involved… Where I grew up in Melbourne, I went to the same high school as Peter, and I played AFL for the same club he did, so we used to do footy and school reunions together.

It was a personal relationship, not just a motorsport relationship. Peter was a really good sounding board, when I first was deciding to leave HRT, it was like a nuclear bomb was going off. I was able to go and sit at Brock’s place, with him and Bev at the time, and we worked out what I was walking away from to what I was heading into. I was the ultimate sinner going from Holden to Ford. Peter figured I wasn’t going to lose anything – I was going to lose about 50% of my Holden fanbase, then going into Ford-world, they’re half going to hate you, but the other half are going to love you – so I wasn’t going to lose anything, which ultimately was the truth. The move itself didn’t exactly go to plan, but for me it was a good challenge, and I’ve never shied away from one, moving from the dominant HRT to help build things at Ford. Back to the question, obviously Bathurst ’06 was in the memory of Brock.

MW- Favourite race car?

CL- Probably the Formula 1 McLaren. I spent the year in Europe in 1997, we were racing in an Austrian based team with Dr Helmut Marko, who is known these days for his ties with Red Bull Racing. I raced for his Formula 3000 team, and I lived in Graz in Austria, and my teammate was Juan Pablo Montoya, which was interesting…

MW- Mainly at border crossings…

CL- When I was over in Europe, obviously because of the Holden contacts here in Australia, I had an Opel car to get around in. Dr Marko called me into his office, and asked me to take Montoya with me, who never had a road car or anything. Which was fine at the time, until you get to a border crossing, and with him being Columbian, you would have to pull all your gear out, all of your clothes out, basically strip searched… and that was on the way to the track, with the repeat on the way home. From memory that only happened for one event, I told Dr Marko no more, so he went on the mini-bus with the crew – same thing happened. In the end he had to get his own way around.

The whole point of ’97 was to get to Formula 1, but I never got there because of the financial side of it, but then later in life I got to drive Lewis Hamilton’s 2008 race winning McLaren at Bathurst. The car was in the country for the speed comparison at the Australian Grand Prix. Jenson Button watched Bathurst back at home with his father, and always wanted a go. So, through Vodafone, our mutual sponsor at the time, we took our Supercar, they supplied the F1 car, and we basically swapped cars.

We spent an hour driving around the circuit in a road car to show Jenson where everything is, but I didn’t appreciate that where you position the Supercar, you can’t place the F1 car because of the crowning of the road. The F1 car only has about 8mm tolerance of ride height, so they jacked the thing right up as high as they could. The engineers had been out on the track a day or two beforehand, and they measured the length of Conrod Straight, and they estimated with the optimal gear ratio for that length of track, the car could have potentially reached 360km/h, so they were worried about that, and they limited the final drive ratio. Jenson did his five laps, and with the crown of the road it was lifting wheels, so going up Mountain Straight you had to drive up either side of the crown. Down Conrod it was sitting on the rev limiter, and back in those days it had the V8 engine, which was awesome, it was revving to 18,000rpm and it was on the limiter for about 10 seconds on Conrod.  It started limiter bashing going down the first hump after the little kink out of Forest’s Elbow, which meant it had a maximum speed of around 310km/h. Jenson did a 1:48sec, we then swapped, and I drove.

When I sat in the car, they explained the steering wheel, which I was told not to touch. I did three laps… heading into turn one for the first time, I hit the brakes where I thought was the right spot, 100m deeper than I’ve ever been in my life. I checked on Jenson’s laps where he was braking, but on my lap, I realised I could accelerate again. I’ve still got the data at home, I got to within a second of his time. Anything mechanically, corner grip wise, I was up on Jenson, because I was so used to not having downforce, but across the top of the Mountain, he monstered me, so the way we achieved our lap times were in completely different ways.

It was an exciting car to drive… everyone had bets on that I’d stall it because it’s all hand clutch operated. I was doing stuff for Pirelli at the time, and the head guy was an Australian who was there on the day. They put tyre warmers on, and he basically said, if you go out of pit lane and go up Mountain Straight, don’t buggerise around with it, because by that stage the tyres would have cooled down, and you would lose confidence in your grip. So basically, I turned out of the pits and put the thing flat to see what it was going to be like, and it was an amazing feeling.

MW- Bathurst – the best track you’ve driven on?

CL- In Australia, yes.

MW- Whoa, this is big…

CL- I’d say Spa is probably the best track, but in saying that, back in ’97 when I raced F3000 at the Hockenheim, it was the old layout that ran down into the forestry, that was an amazing track. I also got a chance to drive a GT car around the old Nürburgring Nordschleife, which is over an eight-minute lap, it’s 25km long. To get my head around it, I spent a day with Warren Luff in a road car to just try and remember which way it went.

MW- Were Hertz happy about that?

CL- They still don’t know!

INTERVIEW & IMAGES: MARK WALKER