Wingo-Montoya partnership takes aim at Cup Chase

After steering Juan Pablo Montoya to a Rookie of the Year season in 2007, crew chief Donnie Wingo hopes to guide the Colombian star into NASCAR's Cup playoffs. Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR

Donnie Wingo had been expecting the call. He'd just not been expecting the caller.

Only a day before the 2006 Nextel Cup race at Chicagoland, the crew chief had been told by Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates team manager Tony Glover that Casey Mears' replacement in the No. 42 Dodge would ring him soon on his cell. It was widely known throughout the shop that Ganassi had coveted Andretti Green Racing driver Dario Franchitti and had recruited the Scot through back channels to leave IndyCar for NASCAR. Franchitti, Wingo surmised, could provide some stability as the team faced replacing Jamie McMurray and Mears in consecutive Sprint Cup seasons.

Brrrrrrringgg.

"He said, 'Hey, I'm Juan Montoya and I'm going to be your new driver next year','' Wingo said, smiling at the recollection. "I was thrilled."

And so began one of the more oddly functional marriages in the Sprint Cup garage.

Montoya, 32, is from Bogota; Wingo, 48, from Spartanburg, S.C., which is 93 miles, and not so foreign, from Columbia, but thousands of miles and worlds apart from Colombia.

Culturally and professionally there appeared no middle ground. Wingo's and Montoya's accents are among the most distinctive in a stew of dialects that resonate through the garage. Confusion should have ruled. But aside from the occasional "understeer" rather than "tight," and a few "affirmatives," the partnership worked almost immediately. Montoya, a former CART and Indianapolis 500 champion, won road course races in the Nextel Cup and Busch Series as a rookie.

Back for their second season together in the renamed Sprint and Nationwide series, it's time to think Chase for the Championship, at least for Ganassi.

"People thought that I would have a hard time understanding him, and 99.9 percent of the time, I'm the only one that understands ... anything he says," Wingo said. "They all ask, 'What he say? What he say?' and I can usually repeat it verbatim. It just comes from working together and kind of knowing what he's thinking most of the time, so I pretty much know what he's going to say."

Wingo has spent 25 years developing that prescience. He won his first race as a crew chief with driver Morgan Shepherd at Bud Moore Racing in 1990, and later two more with Geoffrey Bodine. He joined Ganassi in '03 as McMurray produced 13 top-10s in a rookie-of-the-year campaign. They finished 11th in points in '04 and 12th in '05 before McMurray left the team and was replaced by Mears, who bolted for Hendrick Motorsports after '06.

The prospect of finding stability with Montoya in an organization that, in three years, had turned over its entire driver lineup -- and added Franchitti this season to replace David Stremme -- was attractive to Wingo. Montoya's Cup win at Sonoma, Calif., was the organization's first in five seasons.

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