For fast-learning Montoya, the curve only gets steeper

Juan Montoya's old pals enjoyed quite a weekend in Australia. Kimi Raikkonen, his former teammate with the McLaren Mercedes Formula One team, won the circuit's season-opening race in Melbourne. Two new drivers for McLaren, which split with the seven-time F1 race winner after last season, placed second and third.

• Send David your thoughts

Not than Montoya noticed. The most accomplished rookie in the history of NASCAR's premier series watched only the start of the race, a typical F1 snooze-fest that Raikkonen won by more than seven seconds. The next day he turned in an eyebrow-raising drive at Atlanta Motor Speedway that gave everyone in Nextel Cup a glimpse of what the Colombian is capable.

It wasn't just the result, a career-best fifth-place finish on a superfast 1.5-mile oval Montoya had seen for the first time just three days earlier. It was how he did it -- running up against the wall, slapping the concrete but staying in contention, showing that mixture of pesky aggression and racetrack panache that made him such a star in staid, robotic Formula One.

Too bad there are some old-school types out there who still can't get past the guy's accent. Maybe one day they'll drop the xenophobic tendencies long enough to realize that he's just the kind of driver they'd like to watch. Because what Montoya did Sunday was old-school to the core, hanging his car out for all it was worth, taking risks, hustling that Dodge around Atlanta in a way that left even his peers impressed.

Montoya's transition from open-wheeled cars has appeared seamless to this point, with a top-20 in the Daytona 500 followed by competitive runs at California and Las Vegas, a victory in the Busch race at Mexico City, and Sunday's coming-out party at Atlanta. By any standard, he's off to an astonishingly quick start. In less than a year, he's graduated from a driver with almost zero stock-car experience to someone who could win on an oval track at some point this season.

There are plenty of more accomplished NASCAR drivers -- like Kurt Busch, Ryan Newman and Dale Earnhardt Jr. -- staring up at him in the Nextel Cup standings. But now the series moves to tiny Bristol Motor Speedway, where Montoya's learning curve becomes as steep as the 36-degree banking in the corners of the east Tennessee track.

Unsweet dreams

Juan Montoya dreams of Atlanta and unfortunately, Bristol, too. "I'm getting comfortable now on these tracks. I need to work on the other ones. We go to Bristol, that's going to be a nightmare. Martinsville will probably be another tough one."

• Complete story

Montoya may have won on the highly technical F1 street course at Monaco -- arguably the most difficult automobile racecourse on the planet -- but he's never seen anything like Bristol, home to Sunday's Food City 500. He's never raced at a venue that's the equivalent of an automotive fistfight, never competed at a place where contact is almost compulsory, never followed that with another race at another short track that's less about winning and more about attrition.

So far, we've learned much about Juan Montoya -- that he'll be the driver to beat on every road course, that he's not afraid to stick the nose of his car in places some people don't think it belongs, that he can get to the front in Ganassi cars that haven't been near the front a whole lot the last few years, that innate driving talent translates from one series to the next. And we'll know much more about him after two weeks roughing it at Bristol and Martinsville, places where his aggressiveness behind the wheel will be both his biggest obstacle and best friend.

The next two Nextel Cup events will show us how much Montoya still has to learn, or prove that he's much further ahead than even his Atlanta race indicated. More minefields loom -- Phoenix, Darlington, quirky, cantankerous places sure to remind him he's not in Barcelona anymore. But if he makes it to the Coca-Cola 600 in roughly the same points shape he's in now (15th) he'll have progressed from NASCAR neophyte to legitimate Chase contender.

That's a lot to ask for from a driver who's still relatively new to this, and has been careful to avoid any kind of concrete expectations. Atlanta won't happen every week. But all it took was one afternoon in the hazy woods of north Georgia to prove that for Montoya, anything is possible.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.