Craig Lowndes is a bastard. There's no other word for it. If being the endlessly-bloody-smiling protege of the great Peter Brock, flouncing between works drives at Holden and Ford in V8 Supercars (yet somehow managing to still remain un-hated by either tribe), and being Mentioned In Dispatches for a Le Mans gig with Audi aren't enough, today he got to live out every teenage boy's dream. No, not the one with 1992 Penthouse Pet of the Year Suellen Underwood, a tub of Neapolitan and a trampoline. (Overshare?) The one where he gets to flog a full-spec Formula 1 car around Mount Panorama at Bathurst. Clowndes got to do that today. Utter, utter, utter, utter BASTARD.OK, so the whole thing was a Choadafone PR stunt, and McLaren's spare Englishman Jenson Buttocks got to pedal the '08 McLaren around the Mount as well, but he's a highly-paid F1 driver who lives in Monaco and is banging a stratospherically hot Japanese fashion model,
so he's an utter bastard by definition. Clowndes lives in a paddock outside Kilcoy and drives a taxi for a living, so he's had to earn the title by deed. Given the last time he pedalled anything as light and powerful was when he was having his arse handed to him as Juan-Pablo Montoya's teammate in European F3000 in 1997, ending up on international television grinning like a Cheshire Cat on nitrous having just flogged Hamiltron's '08 British GP winning conveyance around The Greatest Race Circuit On Earth would appear to be Job Done. In both the 'Proving oneself to be a Jammy Bastard' and the 'Getting This Weekend's AGP And One's Crappy Telco Overlords Metric Shitloads Of Coverage' stakes, one should note.Yet, despite the 'Fuck yeahhh' PR buzz there's a very good reason the Australian GP is at a neutered street circuit like Albert Park and not an actual racetrack like the Mount: everyone would fucking die. Particularly if the Buttocks' assertion that everything from the Cutting exit to the crest of the hill at Skyline would be flat. Not to mention that if the things were set up properly for racing, and not in soft, compliant, look-pretty-for-the-cameras mode, they'd be three-wheeling across the top more often than a Cyclops tricycle, and would be epically undriveable over the Bathurst bumps. Good fun then. Then again, given the terminal dullness of most of the F1 field,
thinning the ranks with some 1960s style natural selection might continue the job that off-season rally accidents have so effectively kicked off.The Doctor is OUT.
