Brian Pattie has been a witness to Juan Montoya's NASCAR journey since the very beginning, from that first test at New Smyrna Speedway more than three years ago. Rather than focus on numbers, the man who would eventually become crew chief for the No. 42 team would go stand inside the corners of the Florida short track and just watch Montoya drive.

Lap after lap, he'd observe entry and exit points, hear the changes in engine noise that accompanied brake or throttle, and study how this exotic new driver managed a bulkier stock car. Then he'd go report his findings to the people running the test.

It wasn't exactly a textbook approach. But that's Pattie, who's not exactly a textbook guy. After all, it's been his willingness to not just think outside the box, but bust out one of the sides, that has Montoya on the verge of contending for the Sprint Cup championship just three years after leaving Formula One behind.

“

I don't want to be a one-hit wonder. I don't want to come in here and possibly make the Chase in '09, and in '10 be 20th again. It's hard to sustain this level. But with what we're doing, I think we can.

”

-- BRIAN PATTIE, crew chief

"I think Brian and everybody on the team, we all do our little part," said Montoya, who moved up to a fairly comfortable seventh in points following his sixth-place result Monday at Watkins Glen International. "I think one of the biggest things is, we seem to have a very good relationship. We understand each other, and it's exciting.

"It's his first full season as a Cup crew chief, and he brought our team to a new level. It's really nice to see. But it's not only him. I think [it's] everybody from the shop to engineers, to people building the cars, everybody. It's a full team effort. You've got to say Brian is the head guy there, and he seems to be doing a great job."

No one has ever doubted the talent behind the wheel. With seven F1 victories, an Indianapolis 500 championship, and a Sprint Cup win on a road course, there's never been a question among those in the garage area about Montoya's ability to make it in NASCAR. But the pieces around him never quite fit together -- the Dodge he drive for his first two seasons clearly struggled in comparison to cars made by other manufacturers, and a succession of crew chief changes left the driver frustrated. The 2008 season that followed Montoya's breakthrough win at Infineon Raceway, the one that began with the "Chase or bust" mission of car owner Chip Ganassi, collapsed into upheaval.

At one point, Montoya had three different crew chiefs in less than a month. His primary car sponsor left the sport. Ganassi was riddled with questions about whether his organization was in disarray. People wanted to know why a talent like Montoya, stubbornly loyal to the man who brought him to NASCAR, didn't go drive for a better team.

And yet, it was that period of instability that created the championship-caliber No. 42 team that heads to Michigan this weekend. Sponsorship concerns led to a merger between Ganassi's team and Dale Earnhardt Inc., putting Montoya in a more powerful Chevrolet. And the last of those crew chief changes involved putting Pattie -- who had worked with Montoya in a handful of Nationwide events -- on top of the pit box.

"I think Juan really likes the way Brian approaches everything," said Tony Glover, team manager at Earnhardt Ganassi and a former Daytona 500-winning crew chief. "He's real thorough, real businesslike, crosses all the Ts and dots all the Is. Right now it's just a good match.

"They have a lot of confidence in each other, and that helps. The team has a lot of confidence in Juan, and Juan has a lot of confidence in the team as well. Right now, everything's going well for the 42 team."

That wasn't the case when Pattie was tabbed to replace Jimmy Elledge in May 2008. At the time, Montoya had only one top-10 finish on the season, and had fallen to 19th in points. In a "Chase or bust" situation, they were clearly going bust. For Pattie, the rebuilding was a slog -- the team managed only two more top-10s, both on road courses, for the rest of the year. But in the tire-ravaged Indianapolis event, they hit on something.

After months of trying to force Montoya to adapt to setups, Pattie approached the issue from a different angle and started tailoring setups to fit the driver. The progress didn't show on the results sheet, but the crew chief saw it, and it laid the groundwork for Montoya's rise to championship contender this year.

"You don't have the resume he's got by being a slack ass. He deserves to be here. We just needed to find the best way to get him to that point," Pattie said. "Basically, we figured out, hey, we can't tell him just to adapt to our setups. That didn't work, obviously.

"So then we started tuning our setups to him. [Teammate] Martin [Truex Jr.] and him don't run the same setups. We can't. but we have the same race cars, which helps. All we did was adapt our stuff to Juan's driving style, and it's working well." (Continued)