Brickyard offers Montoya a shot at redemption

INDIANAPOLIS -- Brian Pattie was having a conversation next to his transporter in the rear of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway garage area, near a chain-link fence where fans gather in search of autographs. Walking over to sign a few, Joey Logano turned to the crew chief of the No. 42 team. "You guys need to slow down," he said with a grin.

Brickyard 400

Lineup

Pos.	Driver	Make
1.	Juan Montoya	Chevrolet
2.	Jimmie Johnson	Chevrolet
3.	Mark Martin	Chevrolet
4.	Jamie McMurray	Chevrolet
5.	Ryan Newman	Chevrolet

• Race Lineup | Photo Gallery
• Montoya grabs Indy pole

It was a somewhat incongruous setting, the favorite for the Brickyard 400 parked back among the also-rans. But that's the kind of year it's been for Pattie and driver Juan Montoya, whose hopes of building on last season's breakthrough Chase berth have been derailed by a series of accidents and breakdowns. Sunday's event has always loomed large for this team, ever since they let a sure thing get away with a pit-road speeding penalty a year ago. But it's made even bigger by the events that have led up to it, and now stands as their best chance to salvage a little pride out of a frustrating campaign.

They've been working toward this, really, in the same, steady way they worked toward that first playoff berth last season. Montoya and Pattie brought a new car to Indianapolis in April for a Goodyear tire test involving 14 teams, and were so fast they left many on hand awestruck. They brought that car back to the Earnhardt Ganassi shop, and fine-tuned it with one race in mind -- the one where they led 116 laps and were schooling the field before the speeding penalty with 35 remaining relegated them to an 11th-place finish.

Even then, though, the season was already turning into an unforeseen train wreck, with engine failure at Fontana and a crash with teammate Jamie McMurray the next weekend at Las Vegas tossing Montoya into a points hole that would eventually grow wide enough to swallow his championship hopes. Now comes Indianapolis, and an opportunity to make up for not only one race last season, but also all the shortcomings they've faced the past six months.

"At that point we were in the Chase, finished 11th, went to Pocono and finished second," Pattie said, recalling the scenario surrounding Indianapolis last season. "It still continued our nice run through the summer. If that were to happen this year, [Montoya] would probably park the car to make a statement. Probably not the right statement, but it's just about where you're at in points. We've changed our goals a little bit trying to get some wins on these ovals, trying to get that [stuff] out of the way, and be back in the Chase next year."

Of course, that doesn't mean what unfolded a year ago at Indianapolis didn't sting. Montoya, true to his nature, had put his blown Brickyard behind him by the time he met with Pattie that following Tuesday. The crew chief seemed to have moved past it, too, satisfied with the bigger picture and the looming Chase, until a few weeks later when he had a conversation with three-time championship crew chief Ray Evernham at Michigan.

"Ray Evernham is one of my idols, and I talked to him at Michigan a few weeks after, and he said, 'Man, that's really unfortunate,'" Pattie said. "Making the Chase was a big deal to us, and our objective was making the Chase. He said, 'No dude, you don't understand. The Chase you can do every year. You're not going to win the Brickyard 400 every year.' He obviously knows more than I do. That's kind of stuck with me."

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.