Seven-time Great Race winner Craig Lowndes and recently retired Race Director Tim Schenken have been inducted into the Supercars Hall of Fame.

The honours have been announced at tonight’s Supercars Gala Awards at the Adelaide Oval, the first time they have been held as a post-finale function since the outbreak of COVID-19.

Despite retiring from full-time driving four years ago, Lowndes arguably remains one of the most popular drivers within Australian motorsport and the mainstream.

He made his Australian Touring Car debut with the Walkinshaw Holden Racing Team in the 1994 Sandown 500 because Rickard Rydell opted not to head Down Under due to his wife’s pregnancy.

Still only part-time, ‘The Kid’ qualified on pole position for both enduros in 1995 and would get a seat of his own in 1996.

It was then that he achieved the triple: victory in the Bathurst 1000, Sandown 500 (both with Greg Murphy) and ATCC.

After heading to Europe in 1997 in an unsuccessful bid to make it in Formula 1, he returned home on a permanent basis, winning two more V8 Supercars Championships (as they were known by then) with HRT.

The 1999 title came despite missing the Symmons Plains event after his spectacular rollover at Calder Park.

Lowndes made the bombshell decision to leave for the Ford camp at the end of 2000, leading to a period in the relative wilderness so…