Brickyard offers Montoya a shot at redemption (cont'd)

With good reason, given that the No. 42 car had a lead of more than five seconds before the pit-road penalty, and Montoya was so "stupid fast" -- his words at the time -- that he was routing the field similar to his performance on the same track in the 2000 Indianapolis 500. And yet, the driver seems to have no lingering regrets, not necessarily a poor character trait in a profession where a short memory is almost a job requirement.

"It sucked what happened, and in my eyes I still don't think that I did anything wrong," Montoya said. "Maybe we were too close to the limit and we blew it as a team and move on. It sucks we didn't take the trophy home, but in my mind I think anybody that is in that team knows that we had the fastest car and we had the pace to win the race. That, I think, counts for a lot. Sometimes people get wins that they lucked into and they get the trophy. We haven't had one of those, but we've had a lot where we've had the car that could have won it. From one side it's a little frustrating, but do I feel like they owe me one? No. Do I want to win it? Yeah, of course I want to win it."

Still, there's no sentimentality, not even for a place that's been good to him, the track that essentially made him a star. Ask Montoya about the first time he ran at Indianapolis, and he said he doesn't remember anything other than the uniqueness of the four 90-degree corners and how fast his car was. Ask him how badly he wants to win here, and he says sure, but he'd take one anywhere. "To tell you the truth, right now, in a Cup car, I will take a win in Martinsville or Pocono, I don't care," he said. Plenty of NASCAR drivers wax poetic about Indianapolis, or get goose bumps just driving through the tunnel. Montoya doesn't.

Why should he? He's competed here in every discipline, won the Indianapolis 500, raced at Spa and Monaco. It's just difficult for him to get worked up about the place, even a place as steeped in tradition as Indianapolis. OK, maybe he did once -- when he and Jeff Gordon did their vehicle swap at Indianapolis in 2003, the original plan was to run the cars on the oval rather than the road course. "I said, no way in hell am I running the oval in a Cup car here," said Montoya, still with the BWM Williams Formula One team at the time. "And here we are."

Here is a place he's become very familiar with at Indianapolis: up front. Montoya paced both of Friday's practices and on Saturday won the Brickyard 400 pole. And yet, given that those first two sessions were primarily in qualifying trim, two-time defending Brickyard champion Jimmie Johnson -- bidding to become the first driver in any discipline to win three consecutive events on the world's most famous race track -- wasn't quite ready to label Montoya as the man to beat.

"I would anticipate what they're doing is going to carry over, but I'm not sure he's the clear-cut favorite yet," said Johnson, who will start second. Saturday's final two practices, executed in race setup and with more rubber in the asphalt, seemed to bolster that claim. Montoya was 14th-fastest in the first and 18th in the second, giving the competition the first glimpses of vulnerability they've seen in the No. 42 car all weekend.

And yet, given where Montoya is starting, and given how unstoppable he was in clean air last season, and given that track position at Indianapolis is more valuable than beachfront property, it's difficult to imagine anyone else as the favorite going into Sunday. Montoya and Pattie have been building toward this Brickyard 400 like teams build for Daytona, the event circled on the calendar months in advance. They can't reverse what happened last year, can't take away all the accidents that have scuttled their Chase hopes. But they can win Sunday, and find redemption in more ways than one.

"My thinking is, the track doesn't owe you anything," Pattie said. "It would be nice to come back and redeem ourselves, but we're not owed anything. We all make a really good living in racing doing what we love to do, and no track owes you. But we would like to redeem ourselves."

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.