Drive-thru dents Lowndes run.

Craig Lowndes was looking good for a top ten finish in the opening leg of the Clipsal 500 in Adelaide, before a drive-thru penalty dropped him out of contention.

Starting from sixth on the grid after making it all the way to the end of the V8 Supercar series' new-look qualifying procedure, last year's title runner-up ran strongly in the top ten before turn four contact with Max Wilson turned the Brazilian's WOW/WPS Ford around at mid-distance and saw Lowndes handed a punishment which dropped him down the order.

Although his #888 Team Vodafone Ford then suffered a return to the handling problems that had afflicted it in warm-up, Lowndes managed to salvage a points finish by rising back to 13th place, just inside the new-look scoring positions.

"We had a difficult day - for a number of reasons," the crowd favourite admitted, "We had an issue with the rear of the car before the start of the race, which we believed we had fixed but came back to haunt us and I ended up with too much understeer.

"We decided to get our pit-stops out of the way early on, but then I got stuck behind Max, who was still to complete a second stop and was holding me up by about two seconds a lap. Unfortunately, there was contact which resulted in a drive-thru' penalty and the goal from there was just to stay in the points."

Despite being disappointed with his result, and the early points deficit to the leaders, Lowndes took motivation from the performance of Vodafone team-mate Jamie Whincup, who claimed third place.

"We will fix our mechanical issues for tomorrow's race and, knowing the speed that Jamie had, I am looking forward to tomorrow's race," he concluded.