Bright's Barbagallo
The weekend started out as usual on Saturday with Skaife recording fastest time in the Top Ten Shootout to qualify on pole for race the Saturday race. He then made good use of the prime starting spot to record an easy win.
Sunday and the second race for the weekend was a different matter. Murphy made a great start in the K-Mart Commodore and took and early lead from Skaife. Obviously there are definitely no team orders between the TWR cousins as the two battled for the lead until Skaife made a mistake coming out of the final turn and nudged the back of Murphy's car. This got the back of the K-Mart car loose and while Murphy was busy recovering control, Skaife slipped past into the lead. In the recent past this type of move has attracted the ire of the stewards, for example Ambrose at Oran Park 2001, and it was no surprise that Skaife received the call for a drive-though penalty. Then in his attempt to recover positions, and series points he went off the track into one of Barbagallo's many sand traps. After recovering from that he finally went off again at the final turn and out of the race.
It seemed that nobody really wanted to take advantage of Skaife's misfortune; a series of driver errors and mechanical misfortune affected most of the usual front runners. This included Ford hero Craig Lowndes ended up in a sand trap courtesy of Todd Kelly, who got a drive though penalty for his trouble. Marcos Ambrose lost his power steering and limped around just trying to finish and score points. Last year's winner Paul Radisich from DJR just could not get Shell Falcon to perform properly on the new Dunlop control tyre and had a terrible weekend.
Craig Baird in the Team Brock Holden made a large contribution to the excitement in race two. He blew an engine and limped back to the pits dropping oil on the track on the way. Critically this included the last turn at the end of the long downhill straight. This claimed a number of cars including front runners Greg Murphy and Craig Lowndes
Perhaps he wanted to drive back to the pits and avoid the complication of having the car rescued from the remote end of the track. Unfortunately he had to go onto the racing line at the last turn to get to the start of
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