Ford goes 1, 2, 3 in a fight to the end

Craig Lowndes and Jamie Whincup showed nerves of steel in the final laps after a roller-coaster ride in the wet at Mt Panorama yesterday to make it successive Bathurst 1000 titles.

The Lowndes-Whincup combination also made it a winning enduro double after success at the Sandown 500 three weeks ago.

A mistake from Whincup when he misjudged his line into pit lane on the last driver change nearly cost the Ford Triple 8 Team Vodafone victory.

“Craig brought the car home nicely,” Whincup said.

“This was an amazing win ... a bit special. To have won Bathurst back-to-back and also win at Sandown, I can't put into words.”

Team owner Roland Dane described Lowndes and Whincup's drive as “brilliant”.

The win also saw Whincup take over at the top of the leaderboard on 461 points, followed by Lowndes (445) with four rounds remaining before the grand finale at Phillip Island in December.

James Courtney (Stone Brothers Racing) was second yesterday and Steve Johnson (Jim Beam) third to make it a Ford trifecta, the first since 1988.

Greg Murphy (Tasman Motorsport) was the highest-placed Holden driver, in fourth.

Yesterday's race turned in a fraction of a second on lap 150, 11 from the end.

Jason Bright (Britek Motorsport), Mark Skaife (HRT) and Russell Ingall (Stone Brothers) were caught out by the change in weather as rain turned the circuit into a skating rink.

Bright was leading when he gambled on a late pit stop, to drive the final kilometres on cold slicks as the weather closed in from the southwest.

The ploy badly misfired. Across the top of the mountain, at McPhillamy Park, he ended in the sand pit as did Skaife after a close shave with the concrete wall.

Ingall also hobbled into the pits on three tyres and no brakes.

But the heart-breaking story of the day belonged to Rick Kelly and Garth Tander in the No1 Toll HSV Commodore, after the car was retired on lap 132 of the scheduled 161.

Kelly started the day as series leader on 443 points, nine in front of Tander, with Whincup and Lowndes on their rear bumper.

“We worked pretty hard and believed we had a package to be up the front, but it just wasn't our day,” Kelly said, knowing he had lost his championship lead.

Kelly and Tander ran without luck all day. Mechanical problems plagued the car as early as lap 10.

With Kelly and Tander out of the frame in the points, it was left to Skaife and Kelly's brother, Todd, in the No2 HRT Commodore, to take the race to the Falcons of Whincup, Lowndes, and early pacesetters Mark Winterbottom and Steven Richards in a FPR Ford.

Richards won the start after Winterbottom had put the car on pole by beating off Holden top guns Skaife and Kelly into the first corner and up Mountain Straight.

Kelly had no luck, nearly coming to grief on lap 25 as he diced with Lowndes.

He shredded the left rear tyre at the end of Conrod Straight at almost 290km/h.

The car went into a violent backward skid across the track as Lowndes dived inside, narrowly avoiding being T-boned.

The young driver from Mildura nursed the stricken Commodore into the pits for the mechanics to make some hurried temporary repairs, add new rubber, take on a full tank of fuel and swap seats with co-driver Tander at the start of the second hour of racing.

When Tander entered the fray for the first time, the Toll Holden entry had dropped to 26th.

In the pre-race warm-up, John Bowe's co-driver Jonathon Webb, at the wheel of the No111 Glenford PCR Falcon, sustained mechanical failure halfway up Mountain Straight and hit a concrete barrier.

That left pit-crew chief Hayden Morris and his mechanics less than two hours to replace the damaged front-end panels.

Another hard-luck story came from Cameron McConville in the No50 Supercheap Auto Commodore. McConville was to have been 16th on the grid, but never got to the start line after the engine on his car blew up on the warm-up lap.

“This is hard to believe,” McConville said. “We had some sort of a misfire, but I just couldn't get time to roll the thing back into the pits before the race start. I think we may have dropped a valve or something.”

The McConville incident led to the first of seven occasions when the safety car had to be called out.

Andrew Jones in the BOC Ford came to an end on lap 53 after fire broke out under the bonnet.