A white-haired gentleman wearing a pair of headphones beneath a black cap listened to the team radio and stood quietly as a younger driver passed by in a red, white, and black car. His face was unreadable: He'd seen so many of these youngsters come and go. "Think he'll get the hang of it?" we ask. Rick Mears smiled. "Yeah, probably, eventually. The kid seems to have some talent."
Two laps later, Juan Pablo Montoya pulls the number 12 Team Penske Dallara-Chevrolet into pit lane on the scruffy, ragged back course at Sebring International Raceway. It's his first time in an open-wheel car since 2006, his first time in an IndyCar since 2000. In late 2006, he moved from Formula 1 to NASCAR, a career change that began with great promise, then sank slowly into near irrelevance for all but two races each season—the Sprint Cup road course races at Watkins Glen and Sears Point. He won at the Glen in 2007, Sonoma in 2010.
Two wins out of 253 races, 72,172 laps, 95,827 miles. For a driver used to winning in IndyCar and Formula 1, it was unacceptable for his sponsors, his team owner Chip Ganassi, and most of all, for Montoya. Not that it was an entirely wasted seven-plus years: Cup winnings alone—not including salary, merchandise, or endorsements—totaled more than $37 million. But no one who spent much time around Montoya and his crew in the Colombian's last few years driving stock cars would suggest he was having fun.
Today, a blustery one at Sebring, is different. Montoya is grinning, bouncing on his heels, looking 20 years younger than his age of 38. He, Mears, fellow Team Penske racer Will Power, and Penske president Tim Cindric circle around the car and talk about the lapping session. To be more accurate, the group mostly listens as Montoya, still bouncing, gesticulates wildly, making steering motions with his hands, and makes fun of himself for missing shifts and braking points, which isn't surprising considering he has been braking a 3300-pound Chevy—roughly twice as heavy as the car he just climbed out of—and shifting a manual four-speed gearbox rather than steering-wheel-mounted paddles.
There are other things to re-learn. Montoya can see the front wheels, but he's having a little trouble remembering where the outside of the back wheels are.
Mears, a driver coach for Penske now and an all-around calming influence, nods and smiles. It happened to him often, especially on ovals and tight road courses, when he'd slide next to the wall and wouldn't be entirely sure just how close his wheel was to whatever he was afraid he'd hit. Look at the tapes of his old races—from a career that included four Indianapolis 500 wins and three IndyCar championships—"and if I wasn't sure where the wheel was, you can see me holding my holding my head to the other side," Mears says, and he demonstrates by looking like the old RCA Victor dog listening for his master's voice. "If I knew where the wheels were, my head was straight up, looking forward, because I was comfortable."
Frankly, Montoya seemed pretty comfortable right away. Teammate Power, who won three races in this car last year, set a base time before Montoya took over, and in short order, Montoya was just three tenths of a second behind Power.
The third Penske driver, Helio Castroneves, made the trip up from Miami to support Montoya—a particularly genuine gesture considering he didn't tell the Penske people he was coming. Penske Racing's three-driver IndyCar team is going to be a formidable one.
The bottom line for IndyCar: Montoya's return could not come at a better time, given the unfortunate and unexpected retirement of the series' most popular driver, Dario Franchitti, after his horrible crash at Houston. Certainly Franchitti will return in some capacity, whether it is as a mentor or a broadcaster, but it won't be the same. Montoya brings his NASCAR fans with him, and perhaps brings back some of his IndyCar fans who have strayed from the sport.
It's a lot of pressure on Montoya, coupled with the complex IRS investigation hovering over him that suggests he owes $2.7 million in taxes and penalties for underreporting income, although Montoya insists he isn't much bothered by that. "I think we have a good case," he says.
But pretty much anything is better than how he describes his last few years in Sprint Cup, driving for a consistently, often inexplicably underperforming team—he and teammate Jamie McMurray have a total of two wins between them since becoming teammates in 2010, while Ganassi's sports-car and IndyCar teams won six races last season alone in a decidedly down year.
Exactly why Ganassi has never been able to get his NASCAR teams up to the Hendrick, Penske, Roush, Gibbs, or Childress level is one of the great mysteries in the sport. He has changed personnel, manufacturers, spent millions, and almost always had full and deep-pocketed sponsorship. Last season Montoya had just eight top-10s and no poles, and finished 21st in points. Mark Martin was 25th in points, and he didn't even compete in eight of the 36 races.
Clearly, it was time for a change, but the change caught the sport flat-footed. "Surprised? Yes, I was surprised," teammate Castroneves told Car and Driver. "I did not expect him to leave NASCAR, plus his relationship with Ganassi goes back so far. And I was surprised he wanted to come back to open-wheel cars. But that he did was a good surprise."
So why did he? You might think that as he gets older, and the fact that he is a dedicated family man, IndyCar's 18-race schedule—half the number of NASCAR's races—would appeal, and he says it does. "But what really appealed to me was being able to run for Roger Penske, and be in a winning car, and work with Will and Helio and the rest of the Penske crew."
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That should help, says Cindric, the Penske Racing president. "In NASCAR, Juan has never had a really strong teammate who was running well—and that is not the fault of his teammates—to measure himself against, to gauge his performance." Now he will.
Cindric thinks it won't take long for Montoya to get up to speed, but getting back his level of confidence, that might take a little longer.
"I had seven years where it was hard because I know I can friggin' do it," Montoya says. "It got to the point on weekends where we never thought, 'Okay, we're going to win this thing,' apart from two weeks out of the year. Otherwise, if we have a really good day, we might run fifth. Even if you have a car that can win you think, 'When are we going to screw it up?' That mentality is tough. And being here changes that."
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com
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