Lowndes: Red Bull future "up in the air"

Craig Lowndes has re-confirmed his desire to continue his V8 Supercars career at Red Bull Racing Australia, but also now acknowledged he may have to look elsewhere to extend his career beyond 2015.

The 40-year old is in the final year of his current contract with the all-conquering Brisbane-based team.

He is one of at least five major talents who conclude their current contracts at the end of this season. The others include Kiwi flyers Shane van Gisbergen (Tekno) and Fabian Coulthard (BJR), David Reynolds (PRA) and James Moffat (Nissan Motorsport).

But intriguingly, rival teams have also been sussing out the status of PRA's emerging superstar Chaz Mostert, much to team principal Tim Edwards' annoyance, while young talents Scott Pye and Cameron Waters will be looking to join the championship in 2016.

Whether or not Lowndes stays at Triple Eight Race Engineering beyond 2015 to drive an RBRA Holden Commodore VF, will play a key role in the rest of the driver shuffling that will inevitably take place this year.

Lowndes confirmed he and his management have had initial discussions with Triple Eight owner Roland Dane, but there were as yet no solid indications about what the future held.

"At the moment we have spoken to Roland but we haven't gone anywhere to be honest," he told v8supercars.com.au. "It is still up in the air.

"It will be what it is," he added philosophically. "I am not thinking about it too much at the moment, I am just focussing on trying to get the car right.

"No doubt in the next couple of weeks we will get the chance to sit down properly and work through things."

Lowndes joined Triple Eight in 2005 and since then has finished second five times and fourth five times in the title chase, but never won it. However, teammate Jamie Whincup - who was recently re-signed a year ahead of contract expiry out to the end of 2018 by Dane - joined the team in 2006 and has won a record six drivers' championships.

Lowndes has recorded four of his five Bathurst 1000 victories since joining Triple Eight, three with Whincup and one with Mark Skaife, the last time in 2010.

"The first preference is to stay here because I have had such a great time and it's like a big family," Lowndes said.

"But you can never say never, if Roland has another direction to go in and it doesn't include me then maybe I need to start looking in other directions.

"But we need to get to the bottom of that side of it first and if we need to start looking outside our little window we will have to."

Despite not claiming the championship since 1999 when he was at the Holden Racing Team, Lowndes is confident that there is still another V8 Supercars title in him.

"I think so," he said. "At the Clipsal 500 we were still able to race with the front guys, we were one of the top three or four in lap times in the (Sunday) race.

"Our race pace is good, the only thing that lets me down is qualifying."

That ongoing issue was obvious at the Clipsal 500, where Lowndes and new engineer Grant McPherson translated 8-7-14 starting positions into a 4-3-9 finishing record to be sixth on the points table.

McPherson joined Triple Eight from Prodrive Racing Australia (formerly Ford Performance Racing) for 2015, replacing Europe-bound Jeromy Moore, who engineered Lowndes for seven seasons.

Lowndes was positive about the experience of working with 'Shippy' and revealed that he had brought some fresh ideas with him from the factory Ford team that were working out well.

"He has a way he thinks about cars and set-ups coming from FPR and I don't completely disagree with the way he looks and thinks about the car," said Lowndes.

"We as Triple Eight are a little bit different to what he has come from, but in saying that it's not to say the way he is thinking is not right either.

"We tried a few things over the weekend which I really liked about the car, so the car is nice to drive. But just to get to the best speed out of it (is the challenge)."

Lowndes said McPherson and he were communicating well.

"Grant is now understanding my way and how I like the car to be ... His information and what he feeds me is great, it's fantastic. I don't have a problem with any of that.

"We just need to find a little bit of a faster package for qualifying, that is what hurt us last weekend no doubt about that. Our race pace in the end was pretty good.

"I am really positive. Everything we did over the course of the weekend really improved the car, we kept making the car nicer to driver, kept taking steps forward. At no point did we have to backtrack or do anything. We kept working at it and the car was responding to it.

"We drove the car to what we had and we just need to find that little bit more to be up the front."