On his way home from a dirty V8 Supercar weekend in Townsville, Craig Lowndes might be cursing the age-old Queensland tourism slogan.
Rather than being beautiful one day, perfect the next – it was awful on Saturday and just got worse on Sunday for Lowndes.
Over the course of the weekend, Lowndes had crashed, been served by the stewards, verbally smacked by Holden stable-mates and crawled home after engine trouble.
Worse still, his standing as number one challenger to Ford’s Mark Winterbottom for the series lead had evaporated.
He now sits sixth, almost doubling the gap between him and Winterbottom.
Short of not showing up, it’s hard to imagine a more challenging meet for the three-time champion.
His first lap drive in Saturday’s race one was heavily criticised by fellow drivers.
He bashed into Garth Tander and James Courtney before being turned around by Will Davison and crawled into pit lane.
After a lengthy stint in the pits, he crashed out a short time later, ending an 81-race streak of avoiding DNFs.
Tander and Courtney didn’t hesitate to serve it up to him in the post-race press conference, with Tander saying the veteran “should know better” and Courtney saying he had no idea what he was thinking.
The stewards agreed, handing him a 25-point deduction and a grid penalty for Sunday’s more lucrative race.
While his team turned around his car in swift fashion for him to complete race two, worse was to come on Sunday.
After he was relegated from pole-position to third on the grid by the stewards, mechanical trouble struck and he finished as the field’s backmarker.
The popular and ever-smiling driver kept a low profile after the race, but must know another weekend like Townsville will end his 2014 championship hopes.
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