Montoya contending right on time

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In only three years in NASCAR, Juan Pablo Montoya has brought Chip Ganassi within sight of his first Cup championship. Nick Laham/Getty Images

Brad Parrott stood amid the threadbare amenities of the small garage and beamed. The banks of laptop computers and data acquisition technology underscored the disparity between the squadron of Ganassi Racing engineers and the handful of part-time/hard-time wannabes massed at Iowa Speedway for this test session in the grass roots ARCA stock series in late September 2006.

But here, at a point on the map between Des Moines and Iowa City, a peek over the shiny-new and empty grandstands from the Central Iowa Water Association tank tower, a few miles from the adult video store and truck stop on Interstate 80, the banks of laptop computers underscored what the crew chief already knew before his hauler rolled into the empty garage for Juan Pablo Montoya's second day in a Ganassi stock car: the Colombian open wheel star, former CART and Indianapolis 500 champion could do this. And he wanted to. And it was going to be fun getting him to the point where he could contend for Sprint Cup championships.

"A couple of months ago, I said that JP from Columbia, S.C., is going to drive our car," Parrott said that day, grinning. "He's fun and full of his self, but he's determined to do well."

As Sprint Cup haulers rolled into Kansas Speedway a few hundred miles to the south that weekend, Montoya began to affirm the fact-based, friendship-based, faith owner Chip Ganassi showed him when he offered him the chance to leave an eroding situation with his McLaren team.

As those haulers roll into Kansas Speedway for this weekend's race, Montoya will have done much better than that. He enters as a Chase for the Championship qualifier in just his third full season in stock cars, third in the standings with eight races remaining in the season, and a serious contender to give Ganassi his first NASCAR championship.

Amazing stuff. No, Montoya insists, just part of the plan.

"That was the goal, year three," Montoya said. "We thought it would take about three years to be really competitive here and year three and here we are. I can't complain."

Not now. He indulged himself slightly last year when he fell to 25th in the final standings -- down from 20th his rookie season -- when he won a race and had a win, three top-5s and six top-10s. He's thrust himself into the Chase with a masterful points-consuming season and has been a threat each of the first two playoff races, finishing third at Loudon, N.H., fourth at Dover. He's started no worse than second in each and led 105 of 300 laps at New Hampshire.

Montoya had made much of the progression by the time he slid inside "J42" that afternoon at Iowa Speedway three years ago. Uncommonly gifted -- four-time Sprint Cup champion Jeff Gordon said Montoya would have to be considered one of the best ever if he won Sprint Cup title -- and competitively combustible, he brought with him an appreciation or fascination for the organic nature of driving inherent to NASCAR but devoid to F1. He reveled in the idea of a NASCAR lifestyle in the motor coach with his family when he first committed to the stock car experiment. He was, it seemed, already more Martinsville than Monaco.

His father, Pablo, an architect, provided that clue that chilly autumn day outside Newton as he clicked off lap times with a stop watch.

"He's a racer," Pablo Montoya said. "The rest is bull----. For him, it's a car: four tires, steering wheel, an engine. It doesn't make any difference. You race, you race. The rest is just different places."

Apparently anyone who was paying attention saw it. Gordon devilishly accepts some credit for Montoya's decision to abandon Formula One for NASCAR. It was he, after all, who swapped race cars with Montoya in '03 for a spin around Indianapolis Motor Speedway in a publicity stunt to promote NASCAR's Brickyard 400 and the Formula One race.

"I think I'll take some credit for that," chortled Gordon, who fulfilled a longtime dream by driving Montoya's Williams-BMW. "That day definitely played a role. And I told him that day I wish we were on an oval, so he could drive my car on an oval because on the road course it wasn't a whole lot of fun, especially compared to his [car]. On the oval I think it would have given him a better indication of what to expect. But hey, it doesn't matter, he still made that jump."

Montoya admitted as much in '06, saying "I felt comfortable. I would have been in Jeff's car and was like, "Oh, my God, I cannot even drive this, than I would not have even thought about it.'' But I got in Jeff's car and within two laps I was quite comfortable with it. I think that's a lot of it."

Gordon said he isn't surprised that Montoya was able to become a highly competitive Sprint Cup driver -- qualifying for the Chase for the Championship in his third full season -- even as most of the wave of open wheel drivers that made the same attempt at roughly the same time have faded. There was never a question that Montoya would get it, he said. The question was whether his race team -- which has won just six of 724 Cup races, none from '02 until '07 when Montoya won at Sonoma, Calif. -- would be able to keep up.

"What I credit Juan Pablo and Ganassi with is sticking with it," Gordon said. "When you have that kind of talent that Juan Pablo has, then it's only a matter of time, and getting through the tough stages. Sometimes the sponsors or the team don't have that much patience and it's a steep learning curve, tracks and cars and competitors and so.

"To me, I feel like he probably would have come along a little bit faster ... not saying anything about Ganassi, but their program has not been as up to par as Juan Pablo has been. And so its taken them three years for both of those things to jell and they've seem to come along really well this year."

The adjustment has been more than just about racing. Montoya faces the same somewhat obtuse mentality that IndyCar star Danica Patrick endured in that he is expected to be the standard-bearer for the minority group to which he belongs. Whereas Patrick was expected to champion the cause of females in motorsports when she became just the fifth to start an Indianapolis 500, Montoya sometimes balks at those who attempt to leverage his ethnicity as a marketing tool, sometimes refuses to perform radio promotions in Spanish. Like Patrick, he asserts his job is to win races. If that entices the untapped niche he represents into following NASCAR, bonus.

"It's great that I'm a Latino. It's great that people are paying attention to what I'm doing," he said. "But when I'm racing, it's all about me. It's whatever it takes to get the job done. When I'm racing hard and I've got a chance to win, I'm not thinking, 'Oh, the Latinos are going to be so happy when I win this race.' I'm going to be happy when I win this race. It's great that I can bring the Colombian name out and the Latinos out and show people it doesn't matter where you're from if you can get the job done, whatever you want to do. But it doesn't mean I live by them.

"If they're not watching it, they're stupid. I've been in all kinds of racing, and there is no racing more exciting that NASCAR racing."

Of course, he knew that all along.

Brant James can be reached at siwriters@simail.com