This weekend marks Craig Lowndes’ last race for Triple 8 racing, 20 years after his first Bathurst 1000 for the team, which began so brilliantly with pole position on the Saturday:

Before being shattered by a simple error inside of an hour, followed by being on the end of one of the more brutal pieces of bad luck ever seen at a mountain that has dished up plenty of it.

Now, to repeat something I wrote about this 5 years ago:

During the 2005 Great Race, polesitter Craig Lowndes – Fresh off winning the Sandown 500 with Yvan Muller – had built a 6 second lead by Lap 15, but his hopes were crushed when he clipped the wall at The Cutting, busting the Watts linkage in the rear suspension and putting himself and Muller 8 laps down.

Still, that wasn’t the unluckiest moment for Lowndesy.

On Lap 28, the Castrol Perkins car of Paul Dumbrell (and Steven Richards) creamed the wall at Griffins Bend, dislodging the front left tyre after a second hit, sending it bouncing off two walls with some speed.

By sheer coincidence, the next car coming up the Mountain was the out of sequence #888 Falcon, with no idea what was coming up.

I believe I’ll let the TEGA onboard tell the rest of this crazy story.

The ironic part was that Triple 8 were one of the few Ford teams to run the ‘Larry Bar’ – The diagonal bar behind the windscreen designed by Larry Perkins and primarily used by Holden teams until 2012.

Despite it being a design to help with chassis stiffness, the Larry Bar turned into an inadvertent safety device for Craig, as was having his visor down, which spared him a similar incident to one Max Wilson suffered at Adelaide in 2003.

Of course, we also got one of the greatest onboard camera shots ever seen:

Lowndes was forced into the pits, and as per the rules, Triple 8 had to punch out both windscreens, and it was a bad day to get hit by a wheel, as wind chill atop Mount Panorama was supposedly some of the coldest on record, bottoming out at -5 Celsius during the race.

Muller later remarked after a stint that he certainly wasn’t sweating.

For the record, Lowndes and Muller finished in 15th and 10 laps down, but as fate would have it, a Triple 8 Ford did finish on the podium, as Steven Ellery and Adam Macrow finished 3rd in car #88, the first Falcon home just behind Jason Richards and the future No.88 Jamie Whincup for Tasman Motorsport, and the winning Holden Racing Team car of Mark Skaife and Todd Kelly.

We’ve had cars hit kangaroos at Bathurst, but not too many wheels hit cars.

Of course, the wheel incident was mostly forgotten about due to the most memorable incident of the 2005 race…

Greg Murphy and Marcos Ambrose at the Cutting.

As it turned out, that incident would prove crucial for the 2005 championship

– With his chances at a championship threepeat in tatters, Ambrose lost the championship lead to teammate Russell Ingall, who went from being rear ended in the Cutting incident to finishing 5th, giving him the lead of the series championship for the first time since 1998, eventually going on to win that elusive title after four runner-up finishes… Ambrose finished 3rd in his last year before taking on a NASCAR career.

– It promoted Lowndes to 15th, helping salvage 136 points to keep his championship chances intact, despite falling to 5th (149 points behinds Ingall) – He went on to win the Surfers Paradise round and finished 4th at Symmons Plains to get within 49 points of Ingall before the last round at Phillip Island, but his chances were ended due to a pit lane infringement in the last race of the season, salvaging 2nd in the championship by 9 points from Ambrose.

Of course, the best part is since I did that original story… Supercars uploaded the entire 2005 race to YouTube!