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FEATURE
Montoya: A Year After the Storm
It has been 12 months since Juan Pablo Montoya parted ways with F1 and set out to carve a new career for himself in NASCAR. Diego Mejia takes a look at how successfully the Colombian has adapted to life with the Good Ol' Boys
By Diego Mejia
autosport.com's NASCAR correspondent
Juan Pablo Montoya
The Nextel Cup season reached its halfway point last week at Daytona, and also a year ago from last Monday, Juan Pablo Montoya made the shock announcement that he was leaving Formula One to join his old Champ Car boss Chip Ganassi in NASCAR.
In twelve months, and 40 stock car races later between ARCA, Busch and Nextel Cup, Montoya's life has changed dramatically.
His career has gone through a very different path to the one that everyone, probably including himself, expected. From being a star in Formula One, he has switched to be a raising star in NASCAR; a rookie, as the yellow stripes on the rear bumper of his No. 42 Dodge still label him.
By no means he is the average rookie, but his results have shown already that the jump to the top division of stock cars has not been an easy one, even for someone with his renowned talent and experience in almost every type of racing.
His Mexico Busch Series win and his maiden Nextel Cup victory at Sonoma proved that he has lost none of his talent and race craft, at tracks where he was able to counter to some extent for the short-comings of his team and car. It is evident that the Ganassi team is not quite up there with the likes of Hendrick Motosports, Roush Fenway, Gibbs or Richard Childress Racing yet.
Ovals tend to equalise fields, and without a good car you're going nowhere. Sure, the driver remains crucial to the outcome of a race, but it's tougher to drive around handling issues despite having only four turns every lap.
When a driver tries do so, he instantly puts himself at greater risk and the wall is sitting there just waiting to prove when he has overdone it. With NASCAR races being as long as they are, the risk is not usually worth taking.
That is to say that in NASCAR, as in any other series, your results are a measure of just how good the driver, car and team are.
It's easy to look at Montoya's Nextel Cup results in the ovals and say that he has been disappointing up until now. But with so many cars, so many tracks and so many different factors coming into the equation, it would be an inaccurate judgement.
Jeff Gordon and Juan Pablo Montoya racing in Atlanta © LAT
"I'm a tough critic and I'm a big fan of Juan's," says four-times Nextel Cup champion and current points leader Jeff Gordon.
"I've seen what he's been capable of doing and I knew that his talent was going to be really good for NASCAR and that he would be successful.
"But I know how difficult these cars are, especially if you haven't grown up racing oval tracks. I think that there have been times like Atlanta where he's impressed me a lot. There's other times when he's done what I've expected, where it was very challenging.
"There's times when it could be very frustrating and I think it's only going to earn himself more respect as well as having respect for the other competitors and fans as well. You've got to go through those tough times, and I've seen him go through some tough times.
"He's probably the fastest learner of anybody I've ever seen. He adapts so quick that there's no doubt in my mind that he's going to have a lot of success here."
The Ganassi factor
When Montoya and Ganassi rejoined, everybody expected them to immediately blossom. And they did to some extent, winning the Rolex 24 sports car race at Daytona in January. But NASCAR, and specially the Nextel Cup, was going to be a very different deal.
Before the Colombian took victory at Sonoma, Ganassi's Cup team had been winless for about for five years - 164 races, to be precise. Since then, the team has grown in size, expanding to a three-car operation in Cup, plus the two cars they run in the Busch Series.
However, the success that has been associated with Ganassi in Champ Car, IRL and sports cars has not translated yet to his Nextel Cup program, which is run in North Carolina, not at Indianapolis where the other three programs are based. It's a completely different structure, fully focused on NASCAR.
Ganassi is still trying to get his operation to the level reached by his other teams, and while Montoya is part of the process, the former McLaren and Williams driver is also trying to put himself up to speed at the same time. Inevitably, mistakes have been made on each side, but both team owner and driver remain patient.
"When you have the whole field, the 43 cars, that are sometimes split by three quarters of a second, you don't have to be that far off to qualify deep in the field," Ganassi said.
Juan Pablo Montoya and Chip Ganassi Racing celebrate their victory at Infineon Raceway © LAT
"But I would say that Juan is doing a fantastic job in terms of taking all this sort of in his stride, if you will.
"It doesn't seem to bother him, but he's learning and you know, we make mistakes from time to time whether it's in the team side or his side, and we all understand it. That's part of taking this thing to where we want to be."
When the season started at Daytona, the goal of making the Chase, fighting for the championship in the last ten races, was mentioned by Montoya and not ruled out by Ganassi.
Although there are still eight races to reach the cut, Montoya is 311 points away from being in the top 12. It's not impossible, but at the moment it seems an increasingly tall order for him to get there.
"I don't think we're hitting any panic button or changing any goals or anything," Ganassi said.
"We're still taking it one race at a time. I think the second half of the season, when we start going back to the same circuits again now, Juan will have a second shot at these particular circuits and he'll maybe understand a little bit more now what later in the race these cars are doing and how they're reacting.
"I'm pretty excited about this second half of the season, to tell you the truth."
So does Ganassi believes Montoya can make the Chase?
"He can certainly do it," he responded.
"Give him a little bit of luck and a little bit of time. I think it's certainly within the possibilities, sure. I think we're good for the top-15 in the points, easy. I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to do that."
A win, a fifth place at Atlanta and an eighth at Texas are Montoya's best results so far. Most of his worst races have come with the Car of Tomorrow, where it seems like his team is having the biggest problems so far. They qualified well at New Hampshire with it a week ago, but the overall trend with the new car has not been good for Ganassi.
"We obviously are able to score more points on speedways and mile-and-a-half tracks than we are in our Car of Tomorrow program," he said.
Juan Pablo Montoya and Johnny Sauter crash at Richmond © LAT
"We've taken on an intensive testing effort now put back together and we've gone back over where we started with the Car of Tomorrow.
"Some of the changes we're making are being implemented and I think you'll see a little different level of performance when our Car of Tomorrow comes back in the coming races."
Learning to be patient
It's obviously not easy for a winner like Montoya to be suddenly fighting in the mid-pack so often, being raced hard sometimes by drivers who have not achieved much in their careers, but who have a car just as good as his - or even better.
One would think that winning in the Nextel Cup for the first time was something Montoya needed badly. However, he felt that it was his team who really needed the victory more than him. He has lost none of his confidence, and knows he has to be patient for success in NASCAR to come his way.
"For me it wasn't much, really," Montoya said of what the victory did for his morale.
"It was more for the team to show them what we can do and how far we can go, and we know we have to be patient because the coming races are going to be tough. The goal is to try and finish as high as possible and see what happens. It will take some patience."
The win has come in between some very tough races for the Colombian, where he has hit the wall, clashed with rivals, and have one bad result after the other. Montoya has never been so patient, and those who know him will tell just how difficult that can be when he is the car.
It would've been easy for anyone to have lost patience already, but he is not taking this as a one-year affair. For someone who has jumped successfully from one series to the other like Mario Andretti, a former winner of the Daytona 500, Montoya's long-term success in NASCAR is not in doubt.
"Talent speaks loudest, no matter where you go," Andretti says. "Out of any discipline in our sport, any of the top drivers that would have the wish to cross the line, go somewhere else and try it with proper equipment, they'll always show well.
"Juan, just all of a sudden had this thing in his head that NASCAR was the thing to do. I had no doubt that he would put one together before the season was over, whether it's road-course or oval, whatever, it doesn't matter, it's still in the series. I'm not surprised, not at all."
NASCAR wants to see Montoya do well and that should certainly help him in the long term. He is part of their marketing strategies and all efforts are being made to attract Hispanics, the fastest growing minority in the US, and make them part of NASCAR's very loyal fan base.
Juan Pablo Montoya autographs die-cast Formula One and NASCAR models © LAT
"We've said Juan is a very talented guy," NASCAR chairman Brian France said.
"We would think, number one, if he's successful, sure it will help us. It will help the sport with the Hispanic fan base that we're trying to create, trying to generate interest for. He's a great talent. We're optimistic, like a lot of people are, that he'll have success in NASCAR."
Full commitment
Montoya is taking the bull by the horns and he knows that he needs to step up to a leadership role within the Ganassi organisation if he wants to be successful with them. He has a five-year deal, from which he wants to get more than a few million bucks every year.
None of his team-mates have his experience, and none of them have Ganassi's ear. The Montoya-Ganassi formula has been successful in the past, and they both want to become a top team in NASCAR. Montoya trusts Ganassi, and Ganassi trusts and supports Montoya. They're friends, more than anything else.
"Working with Chip has been really cool. I really like Chip," Montoya said.
"He believes in you, and he supports you. He's just a guy that really believes in me, and he'll trust you 100 percent. Chip is a guy if something goes wrong, he still always believes I can get the job done."
For his part, Montoya has recently decided to buy a house near Charlotte, not far from his team's headquarters in Concord. The move is fully supported by his wife Connie, who wants to see him do well.
He will spend more time at the shop and will be more involved in the development of the cars, putting in all the expertise he took from working with top-flight organisations like McLaren and Williams.
The team probably still needs to hire some top people with race-winning experience in Cup racing. Some changes are being implemented also, the most recent of them on Montoya's side being a switch in his Busch Series team.
His crew chief Brad Parrott was replaced by Brian Pattie, with the hope of being able to transfer more information from the Busch experience into the Cup program when he does both races on the same weekend.
His real goal after all is the Nextel Cup, not the Busch Series, where he is not doing every race.
Montoya is no longer a former Formula One driver. He is now one of the good old boys. He likes his life, plays golf as much as he has time off from the track, and enjoys keeping himself busy with the hectic schedule of NASCAR.
Only time will tell how successful Ganassi and Montoya will be. The tough times are not over yet, sure, but both know which direction they are aiming, and they're giving themselves the time to get there.
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(R&A fan)
