Hard to see the big picture if little one means so much (cont'd)

That was of little solace to Montoya on Sunday, when the inherent conflict between NASCAR's big picture and little picture was laid bare for everyone to see. Montoya desperately wanted to win at the Brickyard, wanted to notch his first NASCAR oval-track victory in front of a large group of people assembled at the track where he made his name. Once the impact of the penalty finally settled in, you could hear the utter dejection in his voice. Sure, there are other objectives out there, Chases and championship runs of which the Brickyard is but a single piece. But Montoya wanted this one race. Wanted it badly. And when that became an impossibility, he was crushed.

"Why would I speed when I had a 5-second lead, you know?" he said over the radio. "It's incredible. I'm out of words. I just want to park the car. Let's just park the car and go home."

That's when it was Pattie's turn -- his duty, actually -- to intervene and talk his driver off the figurative ledge. "Don't do that," the crew chief said. "Think of the big picture, the 200 people back at the shop. Don't make it worse. Get back in the game here."

There wasn't much game to get back into. Montoya's car wasn't as good in traffic as it had been out front by itself, and the few remaining laps didn't give him much to work with. In the garage area after the race, the vibe around the No. 42 car was difficult to figure out. No question, Montoya was devastated. But his team seemed to come away almost content with the 11th-place finish, which kept them in the top 10 in points and on course to make a run at the Chase.

"You've got to take the positives out of the day," Pattie said. "The car ran flawless all weekend. We haven't changed anything all weekend. Everybody did their jobs. I can't be prouder than I am right now of this race team. We'll pick it up and go to Pocono."

For all Montoya's displeasure over the speeding penalty, there was no one from the No. 42 team banging on the door of the NASCAR hauler demanding answers. Team co-owner Chip Ganassi wasn't in town, and team minority owner Felix Sabates was on his way out of the race track as soon as the event ended. Pattie said he would call Darby, perhaps as early as Sunday evening, and perhaps go to dinner to take a look at the pit-road speed numbers. Once the emotion subsided, nobody was contesting the call.

"It's electronic," Pattie said, referring to the timing system. "[NASCAR] did their job. It's not the old days with the old handheld, so we're fine."

Still, this is a system drivers and teams clearly wrestle with from time to time. There have been 74 pit-road speeding penalties this season, according to NASCAR, and Montoya's violation was one of six recorded Sunday. Of course, only one of those involved a car running away with the second-biggest race on the NASCAR schedule. Still, Jimmie Johnson, who benefited the most from Montoya's mistake -- the Hendrick Motorsports driver held off teammate Mark Martin to win his third Brickyard title, and became the first to win the event back-to-back -- knows what it feels like.

"It's painful," he said, "especially when you're on pit road and you swear that you didn't do anything wrong. I mean, I've been in that position before. I think Sonoma was the last time. There was no way we could get busted for speeding, and somehow we did. I've been there. Certainly, it's not a good position. It sucks. I know two or three days from now, he'll look back and find positives. Any good team does. You look back on how good you ran, the qualifying circumstances, and you build on it. We're going to Pocono [next weekend]. That setup will work there. Those guys will be a threat."

Teams are able to see their race speeds on monitors hooked into NASCAR's timing and scoring system. When they hit pit road, though, they're in the dark about exactly how fast they are relative to NASCAR's limits. Chad Knaus, Johnson's crew chief, would like to see that changed.

"We've got timing and scoring that each one of you looks at as we're running around the race track. That's what we watch and base ourselves off of throughout the event. Once you hit pit road, we don't have any reference," he said. "We have mathematical equations based on the tire stagger, gear ratio, the pit-road speed we have to work off of. I'm hoping that at some point we'll be able to see the pit-road speeds published, because that will allow us to work within limits that we're comfortable with. From a competitor's standpoint, if you don't know your limits, it's difficult to know what it is. You're always going to try to get to the topside of that limit. So Jimmie does that. We push Jimmie to go as fast as he can on pit road. It's kind of an unknown right now. I mean, it's kind of a guessing game weekly on that."

Sunday, NASCAR gave no indication that such a change was forthcoming. And Montoya, calmer outside the car than he was in it, was left to rue what might have been. After all, it can be hard to see the big picture when the little one means so much.

"It kind of sucks, but it is what it is," he said. "Everybody on the Target Chevy did an amazing job. I thought I was on the speed. We've got lights. I was on the lights every time. That lap, I came in slower than the previous lap. We had a day like that before. Once it happens, you can't change it. It's pretty frustrating. But it shows where we're going with the team."

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.