Montoya following same successful rookie blueprint

What a weird race Sunday. I suppose all races are after the frontrunners get kicked to the curb like Martin Truex Jr. and Kyle Busch were at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Looking at the finishing order, I wonder if anybody finished about where they ran all day. Some ended up a good bit better and some a good bit worse.

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One of the drivers who finished a lot further down than he anticipated -- and lost amid the Chase storylines -- was Juan Montoya. Juan's day started badly and only got worse after a right-front tire blew on Lap 34 and did so again on Lap 57. The reason for Juan's optimism is the fact that Atlanta is the site of Montoya's very first top-five Nextel Cup finish. He and the entire Chip Ganassi Racing team were prepared for a strong run Sunday.

Looking back on a frustrating race and a less-than-rewarding 34th-place finish, Montoya said, "Hey, we had a good car and I think that is very important. Reed [Sorenson] finished third and that's great for the team. I think we probably had a car to win the race. The beginning of the race we we're coming toward the top 10 easily. Blew up a tire and killed the car. They kinda fixed it and blew up another tire and damaged the suspension. Came in and fixed the whole car and ... brought it to the end."

After a race like that, you have to find and hold on to the positives.

The same can be said for Montoya's rookie Nextel Cup season. Twentieth place in the standings after Atlanta, and the highest-ranked rookie isn't bad, but his first season points to a whole lot more success than that. With just a little bit of digging, you'll find plenty of good news. You'll also find good reason to expect more if it going forward.

First on the list is his win at Infineon Raceway. His obvious and exceptional road-racing skills aside, Montoya and crew chief Donnie Wingo showed cunning gamesmanship with that victory. To those who e-mailed me after that race, knocking that victory as something less deserved because it fell under the category of a "fuel economy victory," your argument falls on deaf ears.

All NASCAR races are won by the first driver to complete that race's specified number of laps. Period. If somebody is clever enough to accomplish that with one less fuel load, one less set of tires or one less pit stop than everyone else, then God bless them; they're faster and smarter than everyone else that day. Imagine your favorite driver -- or Rusty Wallace, David Pearson or Alan Kulwicki for that matter -- pulling off the same feat and I doubt you'd judge that victory as harshly.

In my mind, even more impressive than his victory at Infineon was his consecutive lead-lap finishes at Martinsville this season. If ever there was a track where a rookie driver can be bullied and intimidated, Martinsville is one. It's tricky, unique and as true a test of stock-car racing skill there is. For a rookie -- with no driver-mentor on the same team, mind you -- to be right there at the end of both those races speaks volumes.

But rookie success has never been foreign to the gritty Bogota, Colombia, native. In his first season in the fiercely competitive Kart Junior World Championship series, he won the title. Then repeated as champion the next year. As a rookie in the FIA F3000, he won three races and finished second in the championship. He won the F3000 crown the following year.

Juan impressed many with each advancement up racing's hierarchy, and his rookie success didn't stop when he reached the top. In his first season in CART, he not only won seven of 20 races in a Chip Ganassi-prepared Reynard Honda, he also won the closely contested series championship over a determined Italian-Scotsman named Dario Franchitti.

Montoya's second season in CART also featured his rookie debut in the Indy Racing League. As was the fashion then, CART teams would on occasion field a team for the Indianapolis 500. When Ganassi decided to do so, he and Juan put a beat down on the IRL regulars by leading 167 of 200 laps and won the race going away. That was his first and only IRL race.

Next stop for Montoya along auto racing's top tier was Formula One. Driving a fast, but woefully unreliable BMW-powered Williams, Montoya's rookie season was capped with a stunning victory at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza over that season's all-conquering home team of Scuderia Ferrari and -- notably -- eventual (seven-time) World Driving Champion Michael Schumacher.

In July of 2006, two days after announcing he had signed with Ganassi to drive in the Nextel Cup Series for 2007, Juan was told by his McLaren-Mercedes bosses that he will remain under contract with the team but will not compete in any more grands prix.

Formula One's loss is our gain.

What at welcome relief it must be for Montoya, or any driver for that matter, to go from the hyperbolic world of F1 -- where politics play nearly as important a role in competition as does driver skill and technology -- to NASCAR where there is, by comparison, very little politics and driver skill rides shotgun with a team's technological acumen along the road to racing success.

As if his rookie-season portfolio wasn't complete, between his Formula One and full-time NASCAR gig, Montoya managed to rack up yet another first-try victory when he won the Rolex 24 at Daytona in February with Scott Pruett and Salvador Duran.

With a victory already to his credit in his first Nextel Cup (and Busch Series) season, Juan Montoya has shown the world that there are very few motorsports challenges he cannot master in short order. Perhaps more significantly, he has also managed to show the world that NASCAR is a worthy and worthwhile destination for auto racing's elite.

Not bad for a season's work, rookie.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.