Feature: Montoya, Calmed and Dangerous

Juan Pablo Montoya and Michael Schumacher could claim to be in a class of their own until two weeks ago.

No longer, with Montoya's run of finishing every race this season in the points ending when his Williams's BMW engine expired in Monaco.

The Colombian starts Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix equal second overall with teammate Ralf Schumacher and 33 points behind Ferrari's World Champion Michael, now the only driver to have scored points everywhere.

The swaggering Colombian frequently responds to questions with a typical shrug of the shoulders, a trademark so-what gesture, but he has reason to feel pleased as the season approaches the halfway point.

His last seven races are very different to his 2001 rookie season. He is calmer but much more consistent.

Montoya has two pole positions, three second place finishes and has not started a race further back than the third row of the grid. His uncompromising approach has also given Ferrari's older Schumacher plenty to think about as he steams towards a record-equalling fifth title.

Ralf, Michael's younger brother who won in Canada last year, still has an edge in qualifying but it is marginal.

Yet last year Montoya arrived in Canada with one finish in seven races and on the back of a driver error that dumped him out of the Monaco Grand Prix after just two laps.

He had led in Brazil, taken a lucky second place in Spain and qualified on the front row in Austria, when he managed for the first time to start ahead of Ralf. But his natural aggression and eagerness to overtake sometimes played into the hands of opponents.

More Experienced

Nowhere more so than in Canada, where he almost came to blows with Jacques Villeneuve in a tussle before the weekend and then crashed out after another mistake. The Colombian was told to cool it after Montreal and his form in the latter half of the season improved, culminating in a first win at Monza in September.

He still sees red, but this year it has been the colours of Ferrari that he has been battling against.

"This year I am a lot more experienced, the team understands me a lot better and it just makes things a lot easier," he said on his return to Canada.

"Last year I had a lot of races where we were in the points and the car broke down. We had a lot of reliability issues and I had two crashes - one in Monaco and one here. I was just trying to compensate for the job we were not doing with the engineers."

Montoya said the car had not been to his liking in the first half of last season and, while Ralf gave Williams victory at Imola in April, he had struggled to make the engineers understand what the problem was.

"It got to a point where I said just change it and from then on things started to go better and they changed (the car) to suit my driving and that really helped," he said.

Montoya, who won the CART title in 1999, also had to change his style of driving to suit Formula One.

"Every car you have got to drive in a different way. There are some cars that if you brake really late then you make more time than going high speed through the corners and stuff like that," he said.

"The Champ Car was a very heavy car compared with the Formula One and the way you drive it was completely different, but how I needed to drive was never really an issue. The issue was that I couldn't really get comfortable with the car. Monaco last year I hardly qualified seventh and I struggled all weekend.

"And this year I put the car on pole by four tenths (of a second). If you are happy with the car and you feel comfortable ... you are going to go further than anybody else."