He doesn't maintain as high a profile in NASCAR as he once did, but make no mistake: Felix Sabates is still around and full of colorful, honest opinions.

Now a minority owner for the company known officially as Earnhardt Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates, he talked at length with reporters last weekend about this year's emergence of EGR driver Juan Montoya, what he believes NASCAR is doing right these days, and what they could perhaps be doing to make the sport better.

Staying focused

Despite a disappointing 35th at Lowe's, Juan Montoya still has his eyes on the championship.

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• Sabates: JPM breakthrough

Question: Sometimes he seems almost nonchalant about it, but how badly does Juan want to win a championship?

Sabates: He may not always show it publicly, but he wants to win a championship very badly. He's very intense. You [in the media] don't see that side of him; we see that side of him. He doesn't want to sound like a rah-rah-rah guy -- but inside of him, he is very serious.

Earnhardt was like that. He was like, 'So I won my seventh championship; that's no big deal.' Montoya is the same way. Some people are just not that rah-rah-rah type of person on the outside.

Q: You said all along that this was sort of a three-year plan to have him emerge as a contender, didn't you?

Sabates: There was no doubt in mine or Chip's mind that Year Three was going to be a turning point for Juan. We weren't worried about it.

Q: Why was that?

Sabates: He saw one oval track in his whole life. That was the Indy 500, and he won the race. He never drove on oval tracks. ... So he comes here to drive on the oval tracks, and our car is like a taxicab. He was used to driving those sophisticated, $100 million or $120 million Formula One cars.

I thought he did a pretty good job his first year. If you look at the history of NASCAR, I don't know what it is but it seems like everyone has that sophomore jinx. For everybody. It's like you're a great driver the first year, and the second year you became stupid. I think that's what happened more than anything with Juan. It's just NASCAR.

Q: He seems to play down the fact that he could become the first foreign-born NASCAR champion and so do you. Why?

Sabates: You're either an American, a Colombian, a Cuban or whatever. But you're driving a car in America for an American series. And if you win it, you're an American champion in an American series. So if you're the first from South America, so what? You could be the first guy from Alabama. That's like a foreign country. What's more foreign -- Alabama or Georgia? They're about the same [laughing].

“

We have no plane. We have no company cars. All we have is whatever Chevrolet gives us. We have two guys staying in a [hotel] room.

”

-- FELIX SABATES

Q: There are four current Cup drivers looking for jobs for next year and all are former Ganassi drivers. ... what does that mean?

Sabates: It means things didn't work out. One of the guys called me and told me where he was going to go before he resigned, and I told him, 'You'd be a fool not to go.' And that was Casey [Mears] when he went to Hendrick. I mean, how could he not go? Who in the world would not want to go drive for Hendrick?

Or Roush for that matter, because when Jamie [McMurray] went to Roush, they were on top of the world. They had just won the championship.

Hey, doo-doo happens.

Q: Now that's it has all cycled around, it seems you're not such a bad place to be?

Sabates: We were never a bad place to be. You know the old saying, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. ... Chip came around at the beginning and people were all like, 'Well, he's an open-wheel guy.' He's not an open-wheel guy; he's a racing guy. We've got all kinds of cars.

We were not very good in the beginning. Remember, when Chip came along and bought my majority interest out [in 2001], we were a Chevrolet team. We finally had a car that was running good, and had an engine. And then -- boom! -- he came in and we made the switch to Dodge. We didn't know if the front end was in the back or the back was in the front. We struggled because of the switch.

Q: You say you are running two cars this season on one-and-a-half sponsors; can you get to two full sponsors by next year?

Sabates: There are a lot of sponsors out there. We're talking to a lot of people. We're going to be fine. But the money that was there before isn't there anymore. You don't have this guy coming through with a wheelbarrow full of cash saying, 'Hey, I'm gonna throw this money at you!'

Now we just have to learn how to manage our sponsorship dollars. And if we can't get more, we'll just go to Chip and get it from him.

Q: What does it say that you guys have improved performance with less money this season?

Sabates: What it proved is that you don't have to have a budget of $30 million to run one car. We made a lot of sacrifices. We don't even have an airplane. We have to rent an airplane to go to the race track. All the other big teams -- Hendrick has a fleet of airplanes, Childress has a fleet of airplanes, Gibbs has a fleet of airplanes.

We have no plane. We have no company cars. All we have is whatever Chevrolet gives us. We have two guys staying in a [hotel] room. We don't have many specialists. Before we would have a guy who was a specialist on the left fender and another who worked on the right fender. Now we've got one guy who puts all the fenders and the roof on the car.

That's the way it used to be. Nothing is the same now, but in 1991 and 1992 we finished fifth in the points two years in a row. We had 12 employees, including the engine shop. And the pit crew was all volunteer.

Q: And you are convinced it would be good to go back to that, in a way?

Sabates: I think NASCAR allowed too much technology to take over the racing -- and the people who had the money, you can look up and down the teams, but they hired the best talent, paid the most amount to the drivers, and they started winning races because of the money. What is happening today is that this [new car], whether you like it or not, it has brought parity to the sport. If they do what they're talking about to engines, there will be even more parity in a couple of years.

NASCAR is looking at the possibility of in the Nationwide Series you can run an engine two or three times. You can put in new valve springs and go running. If they do that, it's going to separate the drivers from the non-drivers.

Rick Hendrick is one of my closest friends, but I kid him all the time. I tell him, 'You could put a monkey in one of your cars and win a race.' ... If Juan was driving a Hendrick car, he would have won six or seven races this year -- because they're that much better. Not that we're bad, but they're that much better.

Q: So if Juan and Jimmie Johnson are in cars that are equal, who wins?

Sabetes: Juan. Because he'd take Jimmie out [laughing].

No, he wouldn't do that. Maybe two years ago he would have, but not now.

Q: What else could NASCAR do to perhaps even the playing field?

Sabates: What they need to do is put a maximum amount on what teams can spend, and NASCAR writes all the checks -- like a dictatorship. You do that, and you'll have 20 drivers capable of winning a race every week. Right now you've got 20 guys capable of winning every week, but some of them are in equipment that's not capable of winning.

Joe Menzer is the author of "The Great American Gamble: How the 1979 Daytona 500 Gave Birth to a NASCAR Nation." Click here to purchase.