MARK Skaife has pinpointed the two moments that set him on the path to retirement from full-time Supercars driving.

Skaife is one of the all-time legends of the category. By the end of 2005, he was a five-time champion and five-time Bathurst 1000 winner – to this day, he remains the only driver with five-plus of each.

But the pressures of owner/driver life caught up with him, Skaife finishing a lowly 16th in the 2006 standings despite recording seven race wins that year. There were more ups and downs in ’07.

Come ’08, there were early warning bells when power steering dramas struck at the season-opening Adelaide 500.

“The car would move around in a straight line… I remember during the race I said to the guys, ‘I’m going to have to come in, we’re going to have to look at this’,” Skaife recalled via the V8 Sleuth Podcast powered by Parramatta Toyota.

“It was one of those ones where I was like, ‘what am I doing this for? I’ve been working my bum off, I’ve got all these other dramas going on and now I can’t even make this thing steer properly and it’s going to fire me in the fence’.

“So that was the first marker where I went ‘na, I’m not enjoying this’.”

Then came the final straw, that October at Bathurst.

“(Jamie) Whincup and I were battling for the lead and I came into the braking area for Forrest’s Elbow, locked the right-hand-front, speared over the hill going too fast, locked the left-hand-front and ended up making contact with the wall on the right-hand-side,” he explained.

“I sort of just resigned myself to the thing that I just don’t want to do this anymore at the moment. That wasn’t a mistake I would normally make.

“It was like an unforced error of the day and really it was sort of evidence that I wasn’t able to compete at a level that I enjoyed, or I thought that I could sustain.”

Before the month was out, Skaife had announced he’d be hanging up the helmet at season’s end.

He went on to be an enduro co-driver for three more years, rounded out by a four-race combination with Triple Eight’s Craig Lowndes that netted three wins and a second.

The Undercut – How hot is too hot?

The Undercut is back for another week, downloading a hot weekend in the Top End for Supercars!