Another teaser image of the Triple Eight car:
I'm not sure about Todd, but I know Rick isn't well liked for the way he won his championship.
Todd isn't too bad, but the problem is that he's just wasting a seat. If Nissan were deadly serious about V8 Supercars, they would have pushed for the best drivers that they could get. They should have lobbied for Webb, Caruso, Van Gisbergen and Coulthard. Instead, they've got one decent driver in Caruso, and three weak drivers in the Kellys and Moffat.
Apparently Garth Tander (while they were teammates) blocked Craig Lowndes from catching him during the last round, hence meaning Craig never got a good chance to win the championship.
That's part of it. The HRTs - mostly Tander - did block Lowndes when he was lapping them at Phillip Island. I recall Tander got a penalty for it, but Triple Eight were furious that it took several laps for the stewards to black-flag him. And during qualifying, Mark Skaife also forced Lowdnes to go the long way around him at the Hayshed - one of the fastest parts of the circuit - even though Lowndes was on a flying lap and Skaife had just begun his warm-up.
Most of all, a lot of Ford fans think that Rick Kelly pushed him off the road in the final race. Lowndes was trying to line up a move on Todd Kelly going into the hairpin, whilst Rick Kelly went to Lowndes' right, where there was no space to make a move. The two made contact and Lowndes spun off, taking out Todd in the process. Rick slipped through and into the race lead:
At the risk of re-igniting an old debate, I believe it was deliberate. Lowndes had already lined up the move on Todd when Rick tapped him, which begs the question of what Rick was doing trying to go around Lowndes like that. The onus was on Rick to back off, and he should have known that if he continued with that line through that corner, he was either going to make contact with Lowndes, or run out of room and go off onto the grass. It's also suspect that he backs off the moment they made contact. Taken on its own, it looks like a racing incident, but when you look at it alongside the other incidents - Tander blocking him, Skaife forcing him off-line at a dangerous part of the circuit - there are perhaps one too many coincidences involved. Lowndes had been stronger all weekend, and only had to finish on the podium and ahead of Rick Kelly (even if Kelly himself was on the podium) to be champion. He was the favourite going into the race, and he got taken out by his main rival. Kelly strenuously denied any wrong-doing, but he never really lived it down.
That's really conjecture though. We will probably never know what happened for certain. What isn't conjecture is Kelly's
results. He only ever won one race - the third race at Surfers' Paradise - and he never won a round outright. Compare that to Lowndes, who won five races and had four outright round wins, including Bathurst. Kelly is really seen as an undeserving champion.
Also, he's one of the sport's great whiners, probably only second to Garth Tander (though to his credit, Kelly doesn't blame the team when he gets a bad result, and then take all the credit when he gets a good one the way Tander does).
(The HRT version at least).though it could be likely that happens, I would be stunned after all the effort they put in to not let any Nissan fall out the game,
