Saturday Sleuthing: Lowndes’ Red Dust Ford

Next weekend the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship heads to the popular Hidden Valley Raceway in Darwin for its 20th visit to the Northern Territory.

Over the years there have been a range of different drivers and teams claim victory up there and occasionally the round has been a platform for different sponsors, liveries and marketing programs to be rolled out.

While we contemplated the 20th Hidden Valley Supercars event next weekend, it reminded us of the time Triple Eight (then running under the TeamVodafone banner) wheeled out special ‘Red Dust’ liveries for the 2008 event at Hidden Valley.

Both Craig Lowndes and Jamie Whincup’s BF Falcons traded their regular fluro red and silver for a special one-off livery designed by Aboriginal artist Raymond Walters Japanangka to raise awareness of the Red Dust Role Models program, which to this day remains committed to improving the health and wellbeing of disadvantaged indigenous youth in remote Australia.

Triple Eight ran the Red Dust livery on both cars

Vodafone - which has returned to Supercars racing this year as sponsor of the Safety Car - backed the Triple Eight team from 2007 to 2012, a partnership highlighted by a range of livery changes in addition to the Red Dust program.

To list them all would take some time, however they did include camouflage colours in Townsville, a surf capped-roof on the Gold Coast (complete with race suits featuring ‘budgie smugglers’, a Brock HDT retro scheme at Bathurst and a pink McGrath Foundation livery.

On this edition of Saturday Sleuthing we’re honing in on the Red Dust Falcon driven by Lowndes as the #888 entry in Darwin back in 2008, a Falcon BF that was in fact built new by the team at the very start of that season and debuted by the three-time champion in Adelaide.

Given the team was superstitious it elected not to number this car as chassis 013, instead opting to label it 888A-012A. But sadly this didn’t stop the car from being damaged on debut after Lowndes and James Courtney argued over the same bit of road in the Sunday race in Adelaide and both hit the fence hard.

Lowndes' car on debut in Adelaide

Lowndes’ car was sidelined for a few events for repairs before returning in time for the inaugural round in Hamilton, New Zealand and its livery change for Hidden Valley was its fifth race event.

It claimed a fifth and fourth in the first two races before a penultimate lap engine failure in Race 3 cost him another fourth place and he ultimately finished eighth for the round.

Lowndes ran this chassis for the rest of 2008 (save for the endurance races from which it was rested) and it rounded out its time with Triple Eight with podium finishes in the last three rounds in Bahrain and at Symmons Plains and Oran Park.

The arrival of the new FG Falcon meant this car found a new home in 2009 with Sonic Motor Racing and it moved into what was then known as the Fujitsu Series in the hands of rookie James Moffat.

James Moffat at Sydney Olympic Park

He won the Townsville round and finished second in the series, scoring the Mike Kable Young Gun Award as a result. The car stayed as the #999 entry in 2010, though with Tim Blanchard replacing Moffat, however the results were the same; another round win in Townsville, runner-up in the series and also the Mike Kable Young Gun Award.

The ex-Lowndes Ford was retained by Sonic for a few years and did not race in 2011 or 2012 before it was sold to ex-Formula Ford driver Ryan Simpson to use in the Kumho V8 Touring Car Series, run by Sonic.

He instantly made an impression too, claiming nine race wins in a row and finishing second in the series despite only joining the series after two of the rounds had already been completed.

Simpson again ran the car in the V8 Touring Car category in 2014, though returned it to a Vodafone livery. He looked on course to win the series until falling fall of noise restrictions in the penultimate round at Phillip Island and he was unable to recover and finished runner-up to Eggleston Motorsport’s Justin Ruggier.

Kostecki at Winton, 2015

His Falcon was sold to the Kostecki family in Perth in 2015 with then-15-year-old Jake taking the helm in the V8 Touring Car Series. He ran it for the majority of that year’s series before he and brother Kurt moved into a pair of ex-Red Bull VF Commodores in the Super2 Series last year.

We touched based with Kurt Kostecki recently and he confirmed the car was sold a month ago, so we look forward to seeing it back on a race track sometime in the near future.

If you have a car you’d like to see featured by our V8 Sleuth this year, send him an email here or visit the website here to get in contact.