Can Montoya's renaissance continue?

Ask Juan Pablo Montoya if the 2015 IndyCar Series season was his last, best shot at winning a championship and be prepared for a direct answer from the 40-year-old Colombian.

"Eh, I've won a championship already," Montoya says, referring to his 1999 CART title. "People remember you for how many times you've won the Indianapolis 500. I've done that twice. I've done a lot of great things. I won the Monaco Grand Prix and two Indianapolis 500s. 2015 was a good year, but we have to step it up this year."

Montoya appeared to be unstoppable in last year's championship. After winning the season-opening St Petersburg round on March 29, he had created a path to lead the points from flag to flag for the entire season.

When he arrived at the final race of the season, at Sonoma on August 30, it was going to take a highly unusual set of circumstances for a driver other than Montoya to celebrate as champion.

The unusual came to pass on a lap 39 restart, when Team Penske team-mate and 2014 champion Will Power tried to pass Scott Dixon for the lead and Josef Newgarden was setting up to pass Power at Turn 5. Power pulled out in front of Montoya and the two Penske cars collided.

"It was aggressive on a restart but Will was doing what he needed to do to win the race," Montoya recalls at the recent Phoenix IndyCar test. "We ended up in the crossfire."

Title outsider Dixon did exactly what he had to do by leading the most laps and winning the race. Montoya was able to race his way back to sixth position and they finished the season tied on points, but Dixon won his fourth IndyCar title thanks to three wins to Montoya's two.

Ironically, when Montoya won his only championship as a rookie in CART in 1999, he finished tied with Dario Franchitti but won on the same tie-breaker - seven wins to Franchitti's three. But he didn't take being on the other end very well last year.

"It sucks, but when you make double points the last race in a road course, and you change the tyre, and you do everything you did for this weekend, and you put so many variables, it doesn't even matter what you do all year," Montoya said afterwards.

"Dixon had a shit season all year and had one good race, and we paid the penalty."

Several months later he's still not really enamoured with the concept of double points. OK, Montoya cashed in last year with victory in the Indy 500 - the other double-points race on the schedule - but if you eliminated the idea entirely then he would have won the title narrowly from Dixon.

"The funny thing is, if you take everything out of double points and into single points, I would still be leading the points - I would still win the championship," Montoya points out.

"You need to be consistent, but last year I had pretty much a race distance over Scott Dixon and finishing sixth [in the final race] wasn't enough. It's really screwed up when, in a normal race, if you finished 20th, you would have still beat him [in the championship]."

Fuming about it he still may be, but in the meantime Montoya has been preparing his 2016 campaign. On the afternoon of August 30 last year he suffered the bitter disappointment of title defeat; on August 31 he was having lunch with his Team Penske race engineer Brian Campe to plot the strategy for another championship run.

"That's the way we work," Montoya says. "That's the reason we're so good. That's why we led the championship all year. That's why we won the Indy 500. We execute, we perform and we do what it takes.

"I'm very passionate. Roger Penske hired me to get the job done and I do my best to get the job done. I love working for Team Penske and I work hard at it. There is a lot of anticipation on my side what will happen this year. I think last year I proved I was quicker. I have evolved really well through my group of guys and engineers.

"We'll start the season and see how good we are or how bad we are, and how much work we have to do. If you do a good job - move on to the next one. If you do a bad job - you still have to move on to the next one. It's about running smart, take what it gives you and then see what happens."

Penske team manager Jon Bouslog, who serves as Montoya's race strategist, believes his charge has what it takes to go one better than he did in 2015. Bouslog has been part of 11 Indy 500 wins at Team Penske but Montoya's dramatic drive from the back of the pack to the front in the 99th running of the event was Bouslog's first Brickyard success on top of the timing stand.

He believes that the way Montoya lost the championship last year only fuels his desire to win it all in 2016.

"I think he still has a lot of good years in him," Bouslog says. "He is definitely very focused. He has a lot of unfinished business now and a lot of pressure to seal the deal. A lot of things went our way last year. We need to make a lot of things go our way this year, which is going to be tough. [Team-mate] Simon Pagenaud is going to run better. He has a year with the team - he is going to be a lot tougher, Helio Castroneves and Will Power too.

"I think we really need to start where we left off."

Bouslog believes the downfall of Montoya's championship charge was not in the final race of the season. He had suspension failure early in the race at Iowa Speedway in July and was the first driver out of the contest. He was also the victim of an ill-timed yellow flag when he made a pit stop at Mid-Ohio in August that ended his chance at challenging for victory.

"There are a lot of things in sports that have been decided by one point or one place," Bouslog says. "It hurts a lot to be that close. We did a lot of things right and we were fortunate a lot of time during the season. We would like to have some things back that we didn't have, like Iowa.

"But it's just the way it happened. It wasn't meant to be. There were a lot of things we did well. He drove incredibly well. The star of the team was him. We were dead last at Indianapolis and we end up winning the race. That was the drive of a lifetime there. I expect him to be as good, if not better, there this year."

When Montoya made the decision to leave the NASCAR Sprint Cup at the end of 2013 to return to IndyCar, it took him a while to adapt to this form of racing again. A win at Pocono Raceway in July 2014 started a one-year stretch where Montoya was among the top drivers in the series.

"Winning gave him a lot of confidence," Bouslog says. "He was running well before Pocono. The win at Pocono proved he could do it. A lot of these guys have questions when they go through their careers - can they still be competitive? Yes, he can be competitive.

"There is a lot more to him than people realise. We were fairly conservative last year with him in our strategy, but there is a lot more he can do. He is a great racer. To use his strengths and racecraft in 2016 is something we might use to capitalise on more."

Montoya has plenty of competition for this year's title, including his three team-mates at Team Penske. Power is as fierce as ever and Pagenaud is hoping to rebound from a disappointing season where he finished without a win and out of the top 10 in points. And, at 40, Castroneves has not slowed down, even though some seem to want to overlook the three-time Indy 500 winner.

Montoya has some talented team-mates but he'll put his record against all of them. "Has Simon won any Formula 1 races?" Montoya said. "Has Helio? Has Will? Have they won the 24 Hours of Daytona? Any of them won any NASCAR Cup races? Well, I have won all of those, so that should keep me on the radar.

"I think I'm really good and I think we have really good team-mates. It's a matter of getting the job done. It's not about what we have done; it's about what we do."

Young Josef Newgarden is another driver capable of stepping up to the next level at Ed Carpenter Racing. He won two races in 2015 and is targeting a title challenge this time round. Similarly, fellow American Graham Rahal finally had a breakout season last year, and was the lone Honda driver to achieve success with the underperforming aero kit.

Rahal won three races and finished fourth in the standings, and his ability to table consecutive championship challenges is another key question for the coming season.

"We expect more of ourselves than anyone else will ever expect out of us," says Rahal, who will once again largely be a solo runner for his father's Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing team, albeit joined by reigning Indy Lights champion Spencer Pigot for three races.

"We were good at a lot of places last year and maximised points at a lot of places, but there were also several places where we didn't. With all the work Honda has put in this year I have no doubt the car will be an improvement - we'll close the gap and be even better."

With two victories and one second-place finish in the final four races of 2015, Ryan Hunter-Reay was the hottest driver at the end of the year, the '12 champion's form indicating that Andretti Autosport was another Honda team to have got on top of running with the new aero kit.

"By the time we knew it, we were midway through the season without anything to show for it," Hunter-Reay recalls. "We kept working. We kept our heads down. We were resilient.

"The Iowa victory [Hunter-Reay's first of the season] was massive. That was one of the biggest wins of my career because of how much of an upside it was and how much of a turnaround point it was. It was a statement win. We really had to dig deep to win that one. I remember crossing the finish line and being so happy I didn't have the energy to lift my arms to celebrate."

And then there is Dixon, the four-time IndyCar Series champion who will again lead the attack of Chip Ganassi Racing.

"The finish to last year's championship and how it played out, the odds were stacked against this team but it showed what we could do as a group," he says. "To come down to the last lap of this championship was exciting for us and to me it was the most special championship because it was completely unexpected."

These are all reasons why Montoya has his work cut out to replicate the title push of 2015. The opposition is very strong and he will have to kick on if he's to grab another single-seater crown.

The good thing is he's obviously classy enough to make another step. Just ask rival team owner and three-time series champion Bobby Rahal.

"Juan is pretty good and he's with a damn good team," he says. "No, I don't think it's his last chance. He's a hell of a good driver. If he hears something like that he is the type of guy that will say, 'I'll show you."

For more on the 2016 IndyCar Series before it starts this weekend in St Petersburg, read this week's edition of Autosport magazine.

Autosport Race Centre Live will bring you full coverage of the season opener from 4:45pm UK time this Sunday.