Juan "Juancho" Pablo "Monty" Montoya Roldán

A Little Background :
Juan Pablo Montoya Roldán was born on September 20, 1975 in Bogotá, Colombia. His father, Pablo, is a motorsport fan and he taught his young son the techniques of carting. His father’s lessons, along with his own natural ability, enabled Montoya to reign as the Colombian National Carting Champion from 1981 through 1984. By 1992, Juan Pablo Montoya was winning Colombian Formula Renault races. When he moved to Austria to race, Montoya remembers being so broke that he didn’t have money for public transportation; instead, he used roller blades to get around! When he finished second in the 1997 Formula 3000 season, he was signed to a multi-year contract beginning in 1998 with the BMW – Williams racing team. In 1999, Montoya was named CART Champion and Rookie of the Year. In 2000, Montoya “crossed over” to race in the famed Indianapolis 500. Despite skepticism from the racing world, Montoya raced to an easy victory; becoming the first Colombian to win in Indianapolis.

Career Highlights:
- 1981-1984: Karting Colombian National Champion
- 1985: National Junior Kart Championship: 2nd
- 1986-1987: Komet Category: National Champion
- 1988: Komet Category: 2nd in National Championship
- 1989: Komet Category: champion
- 1990: Kart Junior World Championship
- 1991: Kart Junior World Championship
- 1992: Colombian Formula Renault: 8 races, 4 wins, 5 poles
- 1993: GTI National Championship Tournament: 8 races, 7 wins, 7 poles
- 1994: Sudan 125 karting: champion
- Barber Saab series: 3rd, 2 wins, 2 poles
- Mexican ‘N’ series: 5 races, 3 wins, 4 poles
- 1995: Formula Vauxhall, UK: 3rd (Paul Stewart Racing)
- Bogotá Six Hours: class winner
- 1996: F3, UK: 5th, 2 wins, 1 pole (Fortec)
- Marlboro Masters: 4th
- Macau GP: ret
- ITC: 16th, 1 race (Mercedes-Benz)
- Bogotá Six Hours: winner
- 1997: F3000: 2nd, 37.5 points, 3 wins (RSM Marko)
- 1998: F3000: 1st, 65 points, 4 wins, 2 poles (Super Nova)
- 1999: CART: 1st & rookie of the year, 212 points, 7 wins, 7 poles (Ganassi)
- 2000: CART: 9th, 126 points, 3 wins, 7 poles (Ganassi)
- IRL: raced and won the Indy 500 (Ganassi)
- 2001: Formula One: 6th, 31 points, 1 win, 3 poles (Williams)
- 2002: Formula One: 3rd, 50 points, 0 wins, 7 poles (Williams)
- 2003: Formula One: 3rd, 82 points, 2 wins, 1 pole (Williams)
- 2004: Formula One: 5th, 58 points, 1 win, 0 poles (Williams)
- 2005: Formula One: 4th, 60 points, 3 wins, 2 poles (McLaren)
- 2006: Formula One: 8th, 26 points, 0 wins, 0 poles (McLaren)
- 2007: Formula One: Named One Of Top 25 F1 Drivers Of All Time
- 2007: Rolex 24 at Daytona Daytona Prototype class winner and overall winner
- 2007: Nascar Busch Series: Mexico City winner
- 2007: NASCAR Nextel Cup Series: Top 5 Finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway
- 2007: NASCAR Nextel Cup Series: won Cup race at Infineon Raceway.
- 2007: NASCAR Nextel Cup Series: Top 5 Finish at Indianapolis Motor Speedway
- 2008: Rolex 24 at Daytona Daytona Prototype class winner and overall winner
- 2008: NASCAR Sprint Cup Series: Top 5 Finish at Talladega Superspeedway
- 2009: NASCAR Sprint Cup Series: Pole Position Talladega Superspeedway

TOTALS:
- F3000 : 102.5 points, 7 wins, 10 poles, 1 time champion
- CART : 338 points, 10 wins, 14 poles, 1 time champion
- IRL : 54 points, 1 win, 0 poles, 1 time Indy 500 champion
- Formula One : 304 points, 7 wins, 13 poles, 2 times 3rd in the championship
- NASCAR Sprint Cup : 1 win, 13 top-tens

When cars race three-wide at nearly 200 miles an hour, give and take is part of the deal. If your ride isn’t running well, you let the faster guy take the faster line. The tacit agreement is that a few weeks or months down the road, when your car is the fast one, the other guy will let you by. But winners are habitual takers, and Juan Pablo Montoya is a winner. He won at Monaco, Monza and Indianapolis. His ability is vast, his patience limited. Mindful of that, team owner Chip Ganassi has given him guidelines: “It’s a long season. Don’t get into petty squabbles.” (That’s guideline No. 2, right after “Don’t lean on these cars” and just before “Don’t take yourself too seriously.”) There’s another edict at Chip Ganassi Racing: Win. Ganassi and co-owner Felix Sabates have fared well in American open-wheel racing, but they’ve never broken through the Hendrick-Roush axis in five years in NASCAR. “People don’t know if I’m serious about stock cars,” Ganassi says. “This validates what we do. When a guy like Montoya says, ‘Hey, I’m your driver,’ that says something about us.”

The chance to win is a major reason Montoya left F1, where the work pays better but where his McLaren team had no chance of beating Ferrari and Renault for the championship. “What I wanted to achieve, I did, except win the championship,” he says. “And that wasn’t going to happen.”

At Homestead, Diamonds Douglas’ first days on the job as a vendor were supposed to be easy. “They put me on the booth and told me it would be very slow,” she says. But they gave her Montoya merchandise. “We had to restock two and three times each day. All the 42 hats sold out two days in a row, all his jerseys. People bought key chains, like, 10 at a time.” Demand ran so high, Douglas’ bosses took apart the booth to sell the display items. She estimates that 75% of the customers were Latino.

Six months prior, only 5% of visitors to the Ganassi team website were from outside the U.S. After Montoya won the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in late January, that figure jumped to 40%, and the Spanish-language hits are nearly equal to the English hits. That’s music to the ears of NASCAR marketers eager to expand the sport from its cottony-white, all-American confines. They’re in the middle of a three-year “initiative” in the Latino market, advertising races on Spanish-language radio and televising them on ESPN Deportes. With Montoya, they get a twofer: a proven Spanish speaking driver with a global following, one by no means limited to Latinos. His reps were pleasantly surprised by the interest from the oil patch—the Siberian oil patch. Seems Montoya’s feud with the Schumacher brothers in F1 endeared him to Russian fans who hold tight to anti-Teutonic sentiments from World War II.

Although NASCAR is new to globalism, league executives know not to assume that every Mexican-American immigrant in California or every thirdgeneration Cuban in Miami or every working-class Dominican in New York will automatically root for just any Juan. The corporate offices are still at work on a master plan to mesh Montoya with NASCAR’s existing diversity and marketing programs. If they’re fearful of blowing this opportunity, it’s only because they’ve never had anything like it.

None of this matters to Montoya’s bosses. “We’re not in the business of taking NASCAR global,” Sabates says. “We’re in the business of racing.” Adds Ganassi: “Juan’s here because of his ability.”

That’s why, with certain exceptions— Hellooo, Newman —the boys from the infield welcome this foreigner as a liberator. Maybe it’s the corporate sponsorships that have tied tongues, or maybe it’s money that has turned drivers bland, but the fiery, funny, to-hell-with-it-let’s-race attitude of guys like Dale Earnhardt, Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip is vanishing. So it’s no surprise that Montoya is constantly referred to as a throwback. He definitely plays a different game. He’s been known to come into the garage and ask crew members, “How you doing, my bitches?” And he has given fond nicknames to many. When asked for a sampling, Mark Rette, Montoya’s crew chief on the 42 Busch Series Dodge, balks. “There aren’t any you could print.” Is there a PG-13 one? “I’ll think about it and get back to you.” He never does.

Montoya is his own man and says what’s on his mind. In a postrace interview in Memphis, he recalled a mix-up with a fellow driver coming out of a caution: “The guy gave me the finger. I’m like, Come on, are we in kindergarten or what?” He eschews NASCAR conventions. Instead of showing every inch of sponsor ads at all times, he strolls the garage with his jumpsuit unzipped to his waist and hanging off his hips. And he drives with ferocity. As an F1 rookie in 2001, he made a daring pass of Michael Schumacher—akin to stripping Michael Jordan in an NBA Finals.

“We don’t want our guys to be vanilla,” says NASCAR communications VP Jim Hunter. “We want all the flavors. We love Juan’s enthusiasm and candor. It’s good for us that he’s here. He’s gonna be fun to watch.”

Still, why is he here, exactly?

“I love the American way of life,” Montoya says. “Everything’s easy. It’s three hours from Miami to Bogotá. You have stores like Target, with everything you need in one place. There’s nothing like that in Europe. The way my life is, I’d rather live here.” He pauses. “I’d rather have a hot dog than caviar.” (Of course, this being Montoya, his dog is a different breed, one garnished with crushed-up pineapple and potato chips.)

Wouldn’t the truly American thing be to stay in F1 and make more money? Montoya reportedly earned $14 million a year in salary alone with McLaren. But he is a restless soul who has never courted authority. The same year he won the Indy 500, he dissed the Speedway, saying the road course there didn’t require the same attention as Formula One tracks. In F1, he not only took on Michael Schumacher, he rammed Ralf Schumacher while he was his Williams teammate. Though Montoya enjoyed some spectacular wins—seven in all—and posted the fastest F1 lap ever, he underachieved after his first two years on the circuit. He was seen as a swashbuckling, 1980s-style driver, à la his idol, the late F1 legend Ayrton Senna of Brazil. That rep doesn’t fly in the modern era of keeping the car on the course and letting the best technicians win.

Montoya grew tired of F1’s control-freak engineers, the endless test laps, the dearth of actual racing, the predictable results. He played Age of Empires for hours and even took up golf, becoming a 10 handicap. And just as rumors heated up that McLaren was unhappy with him, Montoya noticed that Casey Mears, Ganassi’s driver in the Nextel series, was jumping ship. Ganassi was on a runway in California when he heard a familiar voice on his cell phone.

“You looking for another driver?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“You know which car I’m talking about?” Ganassi asked, thinking Montoya wanted an open-wheel seat.

“The No. 42 NASCAR. I’ll drive that f—ing thing.” With his plane taxiing, Ganassi told Montoya to call him back the next morning.

When Montoya did, Ganassi asked him, “You come out of your drunken stupor?”

“Yeah. I’m driving the 42.”

Ganassi called Sabates and said, “You’re not gonna believe this …”

MONTOYA REMEMBERS his first race like he’s still that little 6-year-old in a go-kart. He was running at the front of the pack in Bogotá. Then his best friend nosed him out at the finish line, and little Juan Pablo cried. He couldn’t stand losing. So he rarely lost—not even to his father, Pablo, a world champion who had beaten the great Senna in the fast mini machines. Pablo remembers another race: “Juan Pablo was 13, 14, and I won the pole; he was No. 2. As we raced, I had this feeling.” A feeling of not being able to hold off his son. Juan Pablo would push and Pablo would counter, but the boy would push more. “You know if you push the car you’ll wreck,” Pablo recalls. “But if you don’t push, he’ll pass you and you’ll never catch him. I was thinking, This is just like racing Senna.” Juan Pablo won, and Pablo never competed again. He went to work helping his son win in karts, in GTIs, in Formula 3000 cars, in CART. The younger Montoya won in Colombia, Mexico, the U.S. and Europe. And when he fulfilled his boyhood dream of racing in F1, he won there, too, twice finishing third in the overall standings.

Yet for all of Montoya’s speed, for all of his fire (a YouTubed run-in with a TV cameraman who accidentally banged him in the head is a classic), the man is remarkably grounded. His wife, Connie, is with him constantly, the couple’s two kids in tow. She helps run the Formula Smiles Foundation he started when he became a U.N. goodwill ambassador, funding hundreds of sports programs in his homeland. A childhood pal, known to everyone as Gonzo, straps Montoya in before every ride. “Chip told me a long time ago that you don’t race to make friends,” Montoya says. “That will be different here, I think. In NASCAR you spend so much time with each other, the season’s so long, you get to know the other drivers.”

Montoya’s idea of a vacation is loading up a dozen buddies, along with several cases of paintballs, and spending a week in mock wars outside his home in Colombia. To prove his dedication, he drops his fire suit to show off the bruises on his thighs. “My wife plays too,” he says. “She’s really good.”

A bit of a hotdog? Certainly. A hot-dog guy? That too. It’s why Montoya fits in so well with his new team and why they were all willing to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, last fall to prepare him for Cup and Busch races. “We crammed a year into three months to get him as much seat time as we could,” Rette says. “But there hasn’t been a test or a race where Juan hasn’t said thank you to every guy. After the first test, we all said that once he figures it out, he’s going to be incredible.”

Take Parrott. The third-generation NASCAR man guided Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle to their first Busch Series victories within their first couple of months. Parrott was the calm voice in Montoya’s helmet during practice last fall. He also has been the chief translator through the language barrier—make that the jargon barrier. Montoya is used to wine-andcheese F1 terms like “oversteer,” and during practice laps, he’d refer to how much “inertia” he was bringing into the corners. His stock car compadres sling out slang like “loose” and “tight,” “wedge” and “bite.”

It helps that Juan’s a quick study. Before a race, Parrott lists what he needs to know about the track, from Pit Road speed to hidden bumps to local lore (like the legend that Talladega sits on an Indian burial ground). Montoya devours it all and spits it back the next day. But Parrott still frets about communication. He wishes Montoya would be in the Ganassi garage in Concord, N.C., for Monday postmortems instead of listening in from Miami. “Honestly, the biggest obstacle will be his being away,” Parrott says. “Jimmie Johnson and Tony Stewart live in North Carolina, and they’re in the race shop every week.” NASCAR drivers admire Montoya’s progress, but they warn that he still has a lot to learn, from how to use a rearview mirror to listening to a spotter to stopping correctly in the pits. “He’s fast,” says Jeff Gordon. “He’s got what it takes. But he’s going to go through some tough times.”

Already there have been petty squabbles, with J.J. Yeley in the Busch Series and the tussle with Newman that ended in a fiery wreck. Montoya swears those are in the past and that he’s looking ahead. He figures he had only three to five years, tops, of racing left in F1. In NASCAR, if he plays it right, he can compete for another decade. His jump across the ocean is typically aggressive, but it isn’t reckless. It’s Montoya being Montoya, doing exactly what he wants to do. “I’m just going to be myself,” he says, “and drive the car as fast as I can.”

Tony Stewart has been quoted as saying “I’ve got a lot of respect for Juan. I still stand behind what I said at the beginning of the year. He’s got more natural ability than 99% of the guys I’ve ever raced with.” When you have this kind of talent in your corner, it’s easy to see why why Juancho is here to stay and bound for a Sprint Cup Championship sooner rather than later.