It's a fast elevator ride from the mezzanine to the John Lennon Suite on the 17th floor of Montreal's Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth hotel, but there's plenty of time for driver Jason Leffler to needle Joe Balash, the Nationwide Series director.

"When am I going to get my five laps back?" Leffler deadpans.

Balash laughs.

"I don't have to get them back all at once," Leffler says. "One per race will be fine."

Leffler and Balash have come a long way since Daytona, where Leffler drew a five-lap penalty for aggressive driving after his No. 38 Great Clips Toyota tapped Steve Wallace's No. 66 Chevrolet and ignited a wreck that sidelined Wallace and rookies Justin Allgaier and Scott Lagasse Jr.

Leffler and NASCAR will continue to disagree about whether the tap was intentional, but bygones are bygones on March 18, when banter has replaced any rancor that might have remained from the incident.

It's appropriate that the elevator trip ends at Suite 1742, where Lennon wrote and recorded Give Peace a Chance during his 1969 bed-in with wife, Yoko Ono.

Balash and Leffler have a singular purpose on their trip to Montreal, accompanied by an advance team that includes Tracey Judd, senior manager of communications for the Nationwide Series; Lenny Santiago, director of marketing communications for International Speedway Corp.; Ginny Pritchett, coordinator of broadcast communications for NASCAR; and Stacey Thompson, Leffler's public relations representative.

Tickets for the Nationwide event at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve road course on Aug. 30 go on sale Friday. Though the race is more than five months away, Leffler and Balash are doing their part to make sure everyone in Montreal knows about it, whether French or English is their native language.

The visit to the Lennon Suite comes during a short break in a whirlwind schedule that started at 7 a.m. with radio appearances on two of Montreal's popular morning shows.

Rob Martier, host at the second radio stop, has misunderstood Leffler's last name. He introduces him as "Jason Lafleur" and comments on what an appropriate name that is for a driver in Montreal. After all, there's no greater sports icon in Quebec than hockey legend Guy Lafleur.

Leffler corrects him good-naturedly. "It's Leffler," he says. "It's German."

While Leffler and Balash are busy with radio, race promoter Francois Dumontier and Normand Prieur, who directs the PR efforts for the race, are making the rounds of French-speaking television. Though the story of the skiing accident at nearby Mont Tremblant that claimed the life of actress Natasha Richardson dominates the news, Dumontier does five minutes on Salut Bonjour, Quebec's equivalent to the Today Show, before heading to French-language news network LCN for another interview.

With the departure of Formula One racing from North America in 2009, the Nationwide weekend, which also includes races in the Grand-Am and NASCAR Canadian Tire Series, is the major event of the year for Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, which ISC will operate for the next three years under an agreement with city-owned Parc Jean-Drapeau, the island park in the St. Lawrence River where the track is located.

Jason Leffler and Joe Balash

Montreal Tickets

• NAPA Auto Parts 200

Since its debut in 2007, the Montreal event has run on Friday and Saturday opposite the Cup Series' Pocono race weekend. This year, qualifying and the race will take place on Saturday and Sunday during an off week for the Cup series. That's more fodder for the advance team.

"We like to work on the stand-alone races, because we have a singular message that we send," Balash says before a lunch meeting with print media. "This is a very important market to us, so we're spending some time up here. We did the same thing in advance of some of our races in Mexico City [no longer on the schedule]. And when we go to new venues like Iowa [which debuts this year], we'll spend some time in Iowa and do the same thing."

Leffler is sporting his typical look, with a haircut that's a cross between a Mohawk and the 'do of actor Martin Short's Ed Grimley character. Leffler's hairstyle serves a purpose; the inevitable questions about his locks serve as a perfect entree for a sponsor plug for Great Clips.

In his interviews, Leffler is glib and upbeat, a manner he has acquired without any formal media training.

"It's like laps around the racetrack," he says. "It's just experience. I'm a pretty shy person, actually, but I enjoy speaking in front of the public and talking about the product that we sell, whether it's the Nationwide Series or NASCAR or Great Clips or Toyota. I'm proud to be associated with those things, and I'm proud to promote them."

In the Lennon Suite, Leffler and Balash resist suggestions that they pose for photos on the bed a la John and Yoko. Instead, they flash the peace sign from a settee at the foot of the bed.

After the side trip to the suite come more radio interviews. Then it's back to the airport for the return trip to Charlotte and Daytona. All told, the advance team, which arrived in time for dinner with Dumontier and Prieur the night before, has spent 22 hours in Montreal.

By the time NASCAR's Hawker corporate jet takes off at 4 p.m., the photo from the Lennon Suite is up on nascarmedia.com. Judd receives a text from a reporter who has just seen it, suggesting that, after the cameras stopped shooting, Leffler's peace sign evolved into a one-fingered salute.

Judd reads the text to the advance team during the two-hour flight back to Charlotte.

No one laughs harder than Leffler and Balash.