Who Is Craig Lowndes?
Craig Andrew Lowndes OAM is an Australian touring car driver who won three national championships and the Bathurst 1000 seven times. He was born in Melbourne on 21 June 1974, started racing karts at nine, and won the Australian Formula Ford Championship in 1993. The Holden Racing Team brought him in as a test driver the following year.
He finished second at Bathurst on debut. Drafted into the team for Sandown and then the 1994 Bathurst 1000, the twenty-year-old took second alongside Brad Jones after a late battle with John Bowe. Two years later, in his first full season, he won the championship, Sandown and Bathurst in the same year, aged 21.
A second title followed in 1998 and a third in 1999, either side of a European season in International Formula 3000 alongside Juan Pablo Montoya. He moved to Ford in 2001, then to Triple Eight Race Engineering in 2005, where he stayed for twenty years and won four more Bathurst 1000s — three of them consecutively with Jamie Whincup.
His seventh Bathurst win came in 2018, the year he stopped driving full-time. He has started every Bathurst 1000 since as a co-driver, mentoring a succession of young drivers, and in 2026 moved to Team 18 to share the number 15 with Bayley Hall. The Australian Motorsport Hall of Fame inducted him in 2019.
