Supercars Legends / Australian
Mark Skaife
Skaife carried the Holden Racing Team’s dominance into the new century, then added another Bathurst chapter as an endurance co-driver.
By DriveAgent News · Historical profile · Records checked
The biography
Already an Australian Touring Car champion before 2000, Skaife became the central driver of HRT’s early-2000s success. His five championship titles and six Bathurst victories are full-career totals, including achievements before 2001.
The HRT years
At the start of the century, Skaife was already an established champion. The Holden Racing Team gave that experience a platform for a further run of titles in 2000, 2001 and 2002. For rivals, success meant finding a way past a driver and team who were delivering across very different circuits.
The 2002 campaign captures the scale of the challenge. Skaife won seven of the season’s 13 rounds, including the first five. That is a round statistic, not a claim that he won only seven individual races. Bathurst, shared with Jim Richards, was part of the same exceptional season.
Experience after the full-time years
Bathurst remained a stage for Skaife after the championship-winning peak. Further victories in 2005 and 2010 brought his career total to six. The latter came with former HRT teammate Lowndes, now at Triple Eight, connecting two influential eras of Holden racing.
His place in Legends rests on both parts of that story: the demanding standard of the HRT period and the ability to contribute to another major win later. It also shows why full-career totals need context when discussing the last 25 years; some of Skaife’s foundations were laid much earlier.