BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA - NOVEMBER 04: Corey Brown of the Roar and Luke Brattan of Melbourne City face off during the round five A-League match between the Brisbane Roar and Melbourne City FC at Suncorp Stadium on November 4, 2016 in Brisbane, Australia. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

What could have been a huge boost to his 2017 championship hopes ended in disaster for Team Vortex driver Craig Lowndes after he suffered another right rear tyre failure.

With just a handful of laps remaining and running in a strong fourth place, Lowndesy was looking set to get a top result in the Phillip Island 500, possibly even make it to the podium, but it just wasn't to be.

Craig had a better run in qualifying and started 7th on the grid for race two of the weekend and despite a lap one incident, Craig kept his nose clean and stayed right away from trouble….

"Qualifying was much better today. We had a much nicer car, we'd settled the rear down from yesterday and qualifying seventh was obviously a lot better," Craig said. "We kept out of trouble at the start of the race. During the race we had a really good run up until the last few laps when the tyre failed, but the car was working extremely well. The guys did another great job of strategy."

"We were pushing hard towards the end - whether the tyre failed as a result of that, we don't know yet. We do take a lot of positives out of this weekend, we've rectified some issues over the course of the weekend, we got the car back up and running after the crash on Friday and we had a very fast car. We need to analyse the tyre failure, but we weren't the only ones to have that problem."

Craig ended up finishing down in 23rd place.