SEASON PREVIEW: For Juan Pablo Montoya, consistency remains the key
Juan Pablo Montoya made the Chase For The Sprint Cup for the first time in his three-year NASCAR career when he finished eighth in points in 2009.
// Archive, NASCAR Illustrated
Juan Pablo Montoya came to NASCAR three years ago with a history of winning races.
He had won 11 Indy car races in CART and the Indy Racing League, and seven in Formula One.
Along the way, he captured some of the biggest events in auto racing, including the Indianapolis 500 and the Monaco Grand Prix. His seven CART wins in 1999 were enough to claim the series championship.
He also had a reputation as an aggressive, hard-charging driver who often tried to win at all costs, an image he was expected to bring to NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series.
But after three seasons and only one Sprint Cup victory, Montoya has changed his approach.
He has learned that in NASCAR, it is not all about winning. It’s about being consistent, collecting points and trying to make the championship Chase.
Asked recently if winning another Cup race was his top priority, Montoya said succinctly, “If I could make the Chase this year again, I would be happy. Leave it at that.”
Montoya’s new, conservative approach paid huge dividends in 2009. After finishing 20th and 25th in points in his first two seasons, Montoya’s NASCAR career finally took off.
Demonstrating the type of consistency typical of seasoned veterans, Montoya clicked off 18 top-10 finishes to make the Chase. During one stretch, he had nine top-10 finishes in 13 races.
Though he dominated a handful of races that got away – including the Allstate 400 at Indy – it was smart racing, not the quest for victory, that marked Montoya’s sudden surge.
“My priorities are scoring the most points,” he says. “Sometimes winning will help you do that. But sometimes going for a win will take 150 points away, and by the time you get to Richmond, you don’t want to go thinking, ‘You remember those 150 points or 100 points we gave away that weekend, oh, it would be nice if we had those today.’
“You’ve got to be smart at things like that and just wait to see how the year plays out. If we have great race cars every week, then all of a sudden when you get to Richmond, or four races to Richmond, you are already in and you can take a very different approach. We’ve got to be smart.”
After Montoya’s smart approach got him in the Chase, his Earnhardt Ganassi team stepped it up a notch in the playoffs, clicking off four straight top-five finishes to challenge champion Jimmie Johnson.
Suddenly, Montoya wasn’t just compiling top-10 finishes; he was a factor to win, leading laps at New Hampshire, California and even tiny Martinsville.
“We did push it. We pushed it as far as we thought we could do it,” Montoya says. “When the Chase started, we stepped up the program. We started having better race cars, we saw a chance there and we tried to take it. But when someone clicks like Jimmie has been clicking the last few Chases, he’s hard to beat.”
Though Montoya had five top-five and six top-10 finishes in the Chase, it was a return to his aggressive nature that bit him.
After getting caught up in a chain-reaction crash at Charlotte, Montoya created his own problems at Texas, racing Carl Edwards too hard on a late restart. He hit the wall and wound up with a 37th-place finish – his second of 35th or worse – that ruined his championship hopes.
“The 99 was right against me; I was a lot faster than him and I got loose. He took all the air out of the car,” says Montoya, who finished eighth in the standings. “I could have been smarter and given myself a little more room. I didn’t have to push the issue there, and I did.”
Making the Chase was not only a huge step for Montoya, but for Chip Ganassi, the championship-winning IndyCar owner who put a team in the playoffs for the first time as a NASCAR team owner.
The organization should be even more prepared this season. Going into last year, it had just merged with Dale Earnhardt Inc., creating a two-car team with Montoya and Martin Truex Jr. The team also switched manufacturers, from Dodge to Chevrolet.
Truex is now gone, replaced by Jamie McMurray, who raced with Ganassi from 2002-2006.
Ganassi compares the moves he has made to placing building blocks in the right formation to create a solid foundation.
Ganassi is glad to have a little stability going into this season.
“It’s refreshing that the changes we are making this year are more internal, and more things we don’t talk about all the time, to improve our performance from within,” he says.
With Montoya, who won the 1999 CART championship with Ganassi, he has a driver he believes is on the verge of something special in yet another top racing series.
“The thing with Juan, he rarely, if ever, goes backward,” Ganassi says. “His driving career is like the brick thing. His bricks are always on top of each other. I’ve never known his brick wall to fall down and start over. Some guys go a little ways, and then they take 10 steps back. I don’t see that with him. That’s why I look forward to 2010.”
So does Montoya. Asked what he might do differently if he makes the Chase again, he said, “I would probably be a little smarter. “
THE MONTOYA FILE
• Career Cup victories: 1 (Sonoma, 2007)
• Career Cup top-10s: 27
• Career Cup starts: 109
• Laps led: 428
• Best track: Sonoma (4.3 avg. fin.)
• Worst track: Charlotte (28.7 avg. fin.)
• Did You Know: Montoya is the only driver to have won the CART title, the Indianapolis 500 and the Rolex 24 At Daytona.
Coming Saturday: Kurt Busch
