Acting on Impulse

Juan Pablo Montoya was not in a happy mood when he left Indianapolis for his home in Miami on the evening of Sunday, July 2nd. Following on from his abortive outing in Canada, the last thing he needed was a first lap incident in America, his biggest event of the year as far as fans from his home country are involved.

The fact that the shunt involved his teammate did not exactly help. Publicly, Ron Dennis went out of his way not to apportion blame, but what went on behind the scenes may have been a little different.

After the race, Montoya was seen in animated discussion with McLaren F1 CEO Martin Whitmarsh outside the McLaren hospitality and office area. McLaren are normally paranoid about doing their dirty washing behind closed doors, and clearly the Colombian was agitated enough not to worry about who was watching.

After travelling home to Florida, he had time to reflect on his position. One can only speculate about exactly what went through his mind, but he was clearly not happy with the way things were going at McLaren and with life in F1 in general. There were still options available to him - and it seems that Dennis had yet to formally confirm that the McLaren was definitely not happening for him in 2007 - but his disenchantment with the whole scene was mounting.

Then there was the personal aspect. Last year Montoya became a father, the birth fortuitously occurring during his time off after the infamous tennis injury. But now Connie is expecting their second child towards at the end of next month.

Sebastian Montoya has been a regular guest at Grands Prix almost since he was born, although Dennis is known to have been seriously underwhelmed at the sight of a stroller parked in the McLaren hospitality area. With a second child on the way, Montoya was aware that it was only going to get harder to travel as a family unit, and he was going to miss out more and more on seeing his kids grow up in the coming years. It's a dilemma faced by anyone working within Formula One and travelling to races.

Juan was at home in Miami on the July 4th holiday, just two days after the US GP, and surrounded by friends and family, well away from the F1 paddock, life Stateside must have seemed pretty damn good. And it must have been on that day that things really came together in his mind with regard to a possible future in NASCAR.

On race day at Indy, a few Nextel Cup drivers were in circulation after their Saturday night race in Daytona allowed them to fly into Indy. Montoya certainly talked to his old pal Jeff Gordon, but perhaps more significantly he was present at a routine DaimlerChrysler PR event in a downtown hotel at 9:30am on Sunday.

It was attended by senior Dodge personnel, including team boss Ray Evernham, and the basic idea was to underline to corporate guests, and the few media members who turned up, that there was a family link between the F1 team and the cars that race in the Brickyard 400. Funnily enough, when the event was announced, a few of the journalists joked that its aim was to reveal Montoya's future in NASCAR...

But did that breakfast function really set something going in his mind? Did the link between Mercedes and the Dodge NASCAR effort come into focus for the first time?

Whatever the case, it was on Wednesday, July 5th, that Montoya called the cellphone of his old pal and former team boss, Chip Ganassi. By happy coincidence, Ganassi is one of the leading Dodge owners in NASCAR, a connection that seemed almost too good to be true.

Ganassi hadn't been at Indy, as he had a clashing IRL race in Kansas. I don't know what sort of contact he'd had with JPM in recent weeks - one source says none at all. What he had done was made it clear in the media that he'd welcome Montoya back any time should his F1 options run out.

It seems even Chip was surprised to get this particular call, especially as he was in Barbados at the time on a fishing expedition with fellow NASCAR heavy hitters Roger Penske, Richard Childress and Bill France. The gist of JPM's side of the conversation was, 'I want to drive for you - in NASCAR, not the IRL. And I'm serious'.

Juan knew there was a vacancy in one of Ganassi's three seats, as Casey Mears was going elsewhere.

One of the men previously in contention for Mears's seat was Dan Wheldon, who had signed for Ganassi's IRL team in part because he had his eyes on a future in the Nextel Cup.

In another coincidence, Wheldon is also managed by Montoya's manager, Julian Jakobi. But as Ron Dennis confirmed, Jakobi was out of the loop on this occasion, and JPM was acting on his own.

Things moved quickly after that. On his way home from Barbados, Ganassi dropped into Miami for a face-to-face meeting with Montoya on Thursday, July 6th - bizarrely, it was three years to the day since his spectacular falling out with Williams management at Magny-Cours triggered his move to McLaren...

Chip really wanted to know how serious Juan was, if he realised what he was getting into. Last week, several days after the news first broke, he made some interesting comments about JPM.

"I think his life has changed a bit since I saw him last," said the team boss. "He's married. He has a son. I think they have another child on the way. This series gives him an opportunity to be home on Sunday night. I'm just guessing here, but I think this gives him the ability to have some family life.

"In speaking with Juan, I learned the amount of miles they do each year in Formula One and the amount of time he spends testing, not in front of people.

"He's saying that when you compare the mileage, it's kind of interesting because it's very close, except most of the mileage in NASCAR is in front of people on Friday, Saturday and Sunday as opposed to testing all week in front of nobody in the middle of France. At the end of the day, Juan is about racing.

"One of the first things he said to me face-to-face at the airport when we finally got together, I began to ask him all these questions about NASCAR, and he said, 'Hey, I want to race.' I think that's an important point.

"There's all this marketing and diversity and world appeal and all this stuff sort of swirls around, but what does it swirl around? I think at the centre of all this is racing. He mentioned to me the closeness of the racing."

The basic deal was agreed there and then, and details were ironed out over the next couple of days. Juan also agreed to fly to Chicago for a press announcement on the Sunday.

Both parties could have sat on the news for a while, but there was a danger it would leak out, and obviously Chip was bursting to tell the world. As he was in the country, the temptation to go to Chicago was too great for Juan to ignore.

It was a big mistake on his part. When you are contracted to a team like McLaren and you have no deal for the following year, you are of course allowed to go off and sign up with someone else.

But what you can't do it is show up at someone else's press conference without permission, even wearing 'civilian' clothes. The number 42 Ganassi car carries full Texaco/Havoline logos; McLaren have had, for many, many years, a major relationship with Mobil.

JPM was apparently completely oblivious to the fuss this would cause, and naively believed that the DaimlerChrysler link would ensure that everything would be alright.

Then there's the question of letting the team know what you are up to. There is no contractual obligation, but certainly on a human level it would have been logical for Montoya to have personally called Ron Dennis and said 'this is what I'm doing', before it became public knowledge.

That would have given Dennis the chance to stage-manage the situation in some way. Indeed, there was an obvious PR opportunity here: given time, Mercedes could have turned the DaimlerChrysler connection into a positive and made much of the fact that their man was able to step from one series to another, just as Mika Hakkinen did with the DTM.

Instead, Ron had a tip-off from a third party about what was up, and as it was a weekend, and Montoya's Chicago announcement was just hours away, there was very little he could do.

Of course, this may be exactly what Montoya wanted - put one over on Ron Dennis, and for once be a step ahead of the game. Dennis likes to hold all the cards, always be in control of any given situation, especially when it comes to drivers. It suited him to have Montoya still on his list of possibles for 2007, even if his name was below that of Pedro de la Rosa and maybe even Lewis Hamilton.

He loved being able to announce Fernando Alonso last December, almost before Flavio Briatore knew that the Spaniard was off; he hated having the tables turned on him by Montoya and Ganassi in this way.

Ron's reaction

Juan knew that Ron would not be impressed. We don't know exactly what was said when the pair finally made contact, but after discussions on Monday, July 10th, the team confirmed on Tuesday morning that Pedro de la Rosa had got the job for France. And in another coincidence, the Spaniard also shares his manager Julian Jakobi with Montoya...

Speaking the day after the news was announced, Montoya was pretty matter-of-fact about what had happened.

"It's not a matter of releasing or not releasing," he said. "It's a matter of working together. I'm not racing the F1 programme, but the reason I'm not driving the F1 programme is because DaimlerChrysler's interest at the moment is for me to be here. To be realistic, we're completely out of the championship this year, so there was no point."

It was interesting that Montoya (and Ganassi) used the term 'release', as if his commitment to McLaren was ended and he would soon be officially free to drive stock cars.

As we found out a couple of days later, in Magny-Cours, that was not the view of Ron Dennis. Montoya had tried to be politically correct in explaining what had happened, pushing the DaimlerChrysler angle, and he was probably surprised to see how candid Dennis was when putting his version across.

Whether there are other specific contractual or personal issues involved remains to be seen, but the official reason for Juan being put 'on the bench', to borrow Ron's own phrase, is a question mark over his commitment.

He insists that since Montoya doesn't have to impress anyone in order to earn an F1 drive next year, he will lack motivation in the coming months. I suspect many current and former racing drivers might question that logic.

What does make more sense, perhaps, is this: do McLaren really want to continue to utilise a driver who is so disillusioned with F1 that he is willing to abandon the sport next season?

"It's a complicated situation that's not easily explained, but I'll do my best," Dennis said at Magny Cours. "Our common objective a few weeks ago was to follow the logical path, being that if he wanted to retain his seat in McLaren or get the best available seat in another team, then that would be best achieved by having a very focused approach to his racing and trying to contribute the maximum that he could towards points and podiums.

"Clearly, the season hasn't unfolded for him or for us as we would like, but he was and is still a member of our team, and when I heard about his decision to join NASCAR in 2007, my view - and it's a view shared by all the other decision makers or decision formers in the organisation - was that the commitment he made was questionable, because he clearly didn't have the objective of securing an F1 drive in 2007.

"I took the view - and it was a view shared by many people and both our own organisation and Mercedes Benz, and supported by the sponsors - that he would not be able to bring the level of commitment that we require from our Grand Prix drivers for the balance of the season. And so we took the decision to take him out of the car for an as yet unspecified period of time.

"It sounds a little trite, but disappointment is not a commodity that you can afford as a F1 team principal. You have to face the facts, you have to be extremely diligent in your analysis of all situations, and driver issues are no different from technical ones, and unaffected judgement.

"As it happens, the timing of Juan Pablo's announcement I don't think was well judged, and clearly put myself and many of my colleagues in a position where we felt that his commitment to the balance of the season was going to be questionable. His management didn't know about it, we didn't know about it, and I think our action was appropriate.

"I very much like him, he's a tremendous ambassador for our team, I've enjoyed his company, and I know and share his frustrations. But this is a tough business, and you cannot achieve your objectives in F1 unless you are totally focussed and committed. If I doubt any of those things, whether it's a Grand Prix driver or anybody else that's in the team, then it's my job to take tough decisions, and that's what I decided - along with my colleagues - to do."

Dennis has tried hard to discredit Montoya's decision, and I suspect when he reads these comments, Juan will be seriously unimpressed.

"I think it was by own admission a somewhat impetuous act," Ron went on. "He didn't have the judgement that he sometimes doesn't have in his driving. You have to be considered about everything you do in your life, and it didn't seem to me to be a very considered decision. My understanding of the facts bears that out.

"I think it all happened in a very short window of time. I think it's a decision that had its share of emotion to it, and perception of what his future held for him. I wish him happiness.

"There's every possibility that he'll drive a car at a certain stage this year. The most important thing is that he doesn't regret his decision. Only time will tell whether he will regret the decision."

Dennis clearly doesn't have a lot of time for the series that Montoya has elected to pursue, and his comments won't endear him to anyone over there, either.

"NASCAR is a tremendous show, it has a tremendous following in America, it is certainly very commercially viable to all the participants, drivers, teams and promoters, but for me it's simply not motor racing, because of course so much manipulation goes on to affect the outcome of each and every race.

"This is not hidden from the teams or the drivers, and will be a great source of infuriation to any competitive driver who participates in it, and I don't think Juan Pablo is going to be the exception.

"As so often with his racing career, I think it was an ill-considered, spontaneous decision. He's a likeable character, much loved in our team, and I hope for him it works out."

Why didn't it work?

Ironically it was the very same impetuosity that brought Juan Pablo Montoya to McLaren in the first place. The aforementioned falling out with Williams at the 2003 French GP was overheard by McLaren folk monitoring the radio communications of their rivals, and it was in the days after the race that Ron pounced.

He found a man who was extremely frustrated with developments at Williams, but who was committed to the team until the end of the following year. No problem, said Ron. We want you for 2005. At that time Fernando Alonso had yet to win his first race in Hungary, and with Kimi Raikkonen already on board, Dennis now had to the two men most likely to threaten Michael Schumacher.

Of course, it never really worked out. Even without the 'tennis' injury that caused him to miss two races early last year, Juan has always been on the back foot. He won three Grands Prix in 2005, but rarely was he a genuine threat to Raikkonen. This year nothing seems to have gone right. So what went wrong for Montoya at McLaren?

"That's a question that you have to ask him, really," Dennis said. "At the end of the day, of course the competitiveness of a team ebbs and flows, it's inherent in F1. When I hear some of his comments that are repeated in the media, that we make an understeering car... this is the fifth generation of front suspension, three of which were specifically designed to try to embrace his driving style.

"But the simple fact is, as any GP driver will tell you, every car has its limits. It is rare that the limit is a balanced limit. The terminal performance, as it were, is always going to be an understeer or an oversteer, or some other characteristic that is difficult for the driver to accommodate.

"There is no such thing as a perfect car, and we have to measure drivers by other values - the performance against teammates, their competence in a race, their dedication, their commitment to physical condition, there's a whole range of things that one brings to bear on the judgement that you need to make.

"There were very few things, if any, lacking with Juan Pablo, but he was always on an emotional roller coaster. I'm quite sure that if he can control his emotions and put the passion to very positive use, he could still have a great Grand Prix career. Maybe that's possible, but obviously he's chosen to go down a different path, and history will probably never demonstrate whether he realised his full potential."

For all his attempts to take emotion out of the decision-making process, Dennis won't be very happy with how the Montoya situation has unfolded. It's the third time, after Michael Andretti and Nigel Mansell, that a relationship with a driver has ended prematurely and in some acrimony. It will probably give him a few sleepless nights.

"If the word failure is banded about on the whole thing, then I have to accept a percentage," Dennis says. "But, again, that's part of the job; you can't get it right all the time."

What's in it for Ganassi?

For Chip Ganassi, this is a no-lose situation. He now has a massive, world-renowned star on his books, who is going to attract a huge amount of attention. And as the team boss readily admits, he was struggling to get his hands on an established stock car name, which is why Wheldon was in the frame.

With due respect to the departing Mears, and to Ganassi's other current drivers David Stremme and Reed Sorenson, they don't have CVs to match Montoya's - even if you only consider what he achieved during his two years Stateside in 1999 and 2000.

"From my point of view, it's obviously a tight driver market right now in the [NASCAR's Nextel] Cup," Chip said last week. "It forces people to look outside the box. We've never been afraid to do that. Fortunately, there was an opportunity here that myself and the world were unaware of until not too long ago, so these opportunities don't come along often, and I think when they do, you have to seize the moment.

"It's not a tight driver market across the board. It's a tight driver market when you want good drivers, quality drivers who have the experience. That's what you're looking for. These days, there are plenty of guys out there that can drive these cars, but can they do the job on the track? Can they do the job off the track? Can they have the maturity level to deal with all the scenarios they're going to be faced with throughout the season?

"These are the things the team owners are looking for these days. I wouldn't call it a failure on anybody's part. It's the way of the world these days, across the board in all forms of motor racing. There's a good driver shortage, maybe that's how it should be phrased.

"There are going to be people that accept him, and I'm sure there will be people that don't. It's like that in any endeavour, any time there's change. Everybody likes change as long as it doesn't affect them. The ways of the world are changing. People within our own organisation here had some question.

"I think as soon as they met Juan face to face at the race track, within 20 seconds... The guy has got an infectious personality, number one, and number two, you realise he gets it about racing. I don't have any problem with him being accepted, being nudged around on the track. I'm sure people will try him on for size, but that's all part of it. I'm sure he'll earn their respect on the track, and I'm sure he'll have everyone's respect off the track as well."

Ganassi Racing boss Mike Hull made some observations that give an insight into how the team perceives Montoya: "At the time in CART, he was the best. Period. On road courses, street courses, short ovals and super-speedways, he was a master of each discipline. That's a very rare quality.

"So I guess the thing that he did to set himself apart was to develop this extremely short learning curve on the ovals. He simply knew how to adapt and keep the thing off the fence. The others before him that tried this kind of switch in racing had problems with that. Juan didn't.

"So, his biggest challenge will be to demonstrate that ability to adapt again on the oval. The other thing you have to know about Juan is that he is infectious. He was so much fun to work with because he didn't let anything stop him from getting absolutely everything out of the car. There wasn't such thing as a bad day for him. He'll try and find the best in everyone on the team, and I think he'll make it work."

It says a lot about how Ganassi goes racing that Chip is not into sponsorship mumbo jumbo. The Latin marketing angle is of little interest to him, although - and here's another coincidence - his partner Felix Sabates has Cuban roots, and is therefore the one man in the whole of the NASCAR garage area who shares something of his background with Juan. What matters is what Montoya is capable of doing on the track.

"He brings a lot of excitement, a lot of ability, a lot of attitude," said Ganassi. "I haven't really given that whole Hispanic thing a thought yet... What I want to do, I want to win races. We've always had great drivers available to us to drive, and this sort of says what our team is doing is right and the way we're going about it is right. So he brings some validation as well, I think."

It's yet another coincidence that Texaco was also the main sponsor when Nigel Mansell jumped ship from F1 to Champ Cars. The company has a more international outlook than some title sponsors in the sport, but Chip is not that bothered about Juan's attraction for Texaco.

"In terms of how their demographic matches his appeal, this is something you'll have to ask them. I'm into racing. I'm not into the demographics of major corporations. The interesting thing is Juan Pablo is sponsored by Mobil in F1 and he's under very, very strict rules about what he can say and what he can't say.

"I can tell you this. Obviously we wouldn't do anything without Chevron, which is the parent company of Texaco/Havoline; obviously we were in step with Chevron the whole way about what was going on and they were fully supportive, could not have been more supportive of the plan, the idea and how it came down and moving forward. They're very, very excited, obviously. They're a world class company, and Juan is obviously a world class driver. I think it goes hand in hand."

The bottom line

The bottom line is that Juan Pablo Montoya is a happy man right now. He's convinced that he's made the right choice, even if Dennis is airing the suggestion that the Colombian may come to regret his move. Most importantly, he feels wanted, and that's not a bad thing for any human being to experience.

"The chance Chip gave me to come to America and race NASCAR, you don't get it every day," Juan noted last week, perhaps underestimating how keen Ganassi was to land him.

"Maybe three or four years down the line, maybe the opportunity wasn't available. Maybe Chip wouldn't want to give me a ride in four years. Maybe he could have. Moments come in your life and you can either take them or leave them. I decided to take it. I decided it was best for me, the best for my career, the best for my family, and I'm just happy."

It's a decision that has inevitably caused some upset in F1 circles, as if people take it personally that one of the top drivers is prepared to walk away to do something else. There is life outside F1 and, as we've seen in the past, for Montoya life is something to be enjoyed. And what's wrong with that?

"Every driver I've met so far has been mega nice to me," he added. "It's been 'anything you need, we will help you'. I've never seen that before. I've been in F1 for six seasons. In six seasons, I've been to the Williams motorhome and McLaren motorhome. I've never been to any other motorhome in F1. In ten minutes, I was in Jimmie Johnson's, Roger Penske's. I was in every bus and motorhome and everyone was nice. They're just happy to be there and it's great to see. It's great to see people loving the sport and enjoying the sport.

"I think F1 from the technology point of view is the highest sport there is. It is very well positioned worldwide. But you come to America, and nobody is really interested in it. When I was there, it was hard to see, but now being a part of NASCAR and being able to be involved with the Latin market, being close to Colombia, everything is just fantastic.

"From my point of view, to be able to say five years down the line 'I won in CART, I won in IRL, I won in F1, and I won in NASCAR' - how many drivers in the world are able to say they've won in everything they raced in? That's exciting to me.

"Of course I want to do well. I want to kick everyone's butt there, but it's not going to be easy. Everybody out here is great, and they're going to make my life very tough."

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