Why Montoya is still smiling

Aside from a bit of salt-and-pepper in the hair, the Juan Pablo Montoya of 2014 really doesn't look all that different from the one who terrorised CART and won the Indianapolis 500 more than a decade ago. He looks even younger when he smiles, and right now he's grinning like a maniac.

This is a surprise considering, as we talk, that he's waving towards Barber Motorsport Park's Turn 5 and explaining with considerable glee that he's "getting my ass kicked" by his team-mates through that part of the track.

Getting beaten doesn't normally form part of a driver's standard modus operandi, and it certainly isn't a common source of joy. But this year - or at least, for the first part of this year - it's all in Montoya's plan.

He's a realist, from the moment that his return to single-seaters after a six-year break was announced, he had sought to play down his early-season chances. There's too much to learn, and frankly, IndyCar is too competitive to accommodate even tiny weaknesses.

As an example, take a look at qualifying from Barber (the most recent dry qualifying session on a road course), and compare the gaps to the grid for the Spanish Grand Prix. Montoya qualified eighth at Barber, but his 0.3-second margin to pole would have put him on the front row at Barcelona.

Flip it around, and third-qualifier Daniel Ricciardo's 1.0235s gap to polesitter Lewis Hamilton in Spain would have equaled 21st on the grid in Alabama.

Of course, it's a flawed comparison in many ways, but you get the point. IndyCar is hard, especially for someone who has just parachuted into the series - even if that someone has a CV like Montoya's. Yet not only is he realistic about what he's facing, he's actually relishing it.

Rookie Montoya stunned Indy in 2000 © LAT

"I'm really enjoying myself. I think my expectations have been really in check. IndyCar is fun, but really hard, because the cars are so close together.

"In Formula 1, when you're in a good car, you do an average lap and you're P5. Here, you do an average lap and you're 15th. Like, you truly are 15th."

It's precisely this that makes judging Montoya's form purely on results so treacherous. IndyCar's ban on using the softer red tyres in testing, coupled with a wet qualifying session for the opener at St Petersburg, meant that he had literally zero experience with them when they were bolted onto his car during the race.

Knowing how to exploit the reds is a key part of any IndyCar driver's toolkit, so this was a serious disadvantage, yet he remained in the top 10 for much of his debut race before being shuffled back late on.

"They told me before the race, 'We need qualifying laps', so based on what I'd seen the day before, I thought I just had to drive the shit out of it," he says. "And I did. I drove qualifying laps, and on lap 15 I was out of tyres [cackles]. And they told me, 'You need 15 more'."

Next time out at Long Beach he sidestepped the chaos to finish fourth; at Barber he mounted an extraordinary charge through the field before being caught out by the drying track and spinning; on the Indy road course he was the fastest guy on the track during much of the first stint, but was derailed first by a collision with Graham Rahal, and then by a suspension problem.

So the road-course pace is almost there. But the place where he believes he is already equipped to shine is on the biggest stage of them all. Before he'd even tested the car properly he had earmarked Indianapolis as the one place he felt that he could make in impression in his first year back, and the fact that he's perhaps slightly ahead of his self-imposed curve on road courses has only bolstered his optimism.

"Speed-wise I'm 100 per cent. I can get it done, no problem,:" he says. "Indy should be good. We've been getting better and better and better with every race. But it's a fine line between doing it right, and making a fool of yourself.

"The biggest thing for me right now is putting a good lap together. We were just going over the sector times, and the team looked at me and went, 'you dumbass'. [laughs]."

That confidence was backed up by the numbers during the opening days of practice. He was the '2' in a Penske 1-2-3 on the opening day of running, and backed that up by going fifth on day two.

"I did a lot of running by myself and then I ran behind someone just to start getting used to the feel of that; the understeer and how the car feels in traffic," he says. "Right now we just want to get comfortable in the car. The first time I was here it took me about three laps to get comfortable. This time it was a few more."

As the Month of May progressed, so did the comfort level. His times remained modest through he middle practice days as he gained experience with running in dirty air, and he was solid in qualifying on his way to a starting spot of 10th. Again: underwhelming in isolation; less so when you factor in that he outqualified all five Ganassi drivers, including reigning series champion Scott Dixon and last year's Indy 500 winner Tony Kanaan.

"The big ovals are fine," Montoya says. "I think I'm going to struggle on the small ovals. We'll see when we get there. But I have a lot of balls, so bravery is not an issue.

"We went testing at Texas, and I was a little concerned because the car was a handful. I went into Turn 1 and the thing is snapping down the straight, and you're trying to go in there wide open, and I'm like, 'I know these guys are going to be running wide open so I'd better run wide open'.

"Then when we got to the lunch break I found out I was the only guy going wide-open. We've got enough time. For Indy, it's a matter of how good the car is going to be. At the end of the day, as you go closer to terminal velocity, the small details make a bigger difference, the way they would at Daytona."

Getting up to speed at Indy took a bit longer than it did first time around © LAT

Before the season began, Team Penske president Tim Cindric told AUTOSPORT that he felt the team had signed Montoya when the Colombian was at his peak mentally, and admitted their faith that his speed had endured was based almost on a hunch.

If that's what it was, then the early signs are the gamble is paying off. The interesting bit is that Montoya himself feels he was almost better prepared for American single-seaters the first time around.

"When I first came to Indycar, Mo Nunn said, 'Take your time, build it slow, get comfortable'," he says. "What people don't realise is that when I came here the first time I'd just won six [seven in fact - ed] races in the F3000 championship, I was a Williams test driver, so I wasn't really a rookie.

"Now, I haven't driven a formula car in six fricken' years. But I am comfortable in the car. It's cool, I don't feel out of place or anything. The biggest thing is getting it to drive well."

And tantalisingly for those who remember some of his more swashbuckling races from a decade ago, the art of overtaking in a single-seater has come back to him.

"It's funny because I see the guy ahead, I know I can do it, and then it's... 'you pussy' [laughs]. You're following people and you go, 'I should just take it'. And I'm starting to. But I don't want to do something really stupid. If it's for the win, ab-so-lute-ly. I'll do the most stupid thing in the world. But if it's not for a win, no."

That secret list that every driver has of the person they least want to see in their mirrors if they're leading during the final few laps at Indy? You sense that Montoya has just moved up a few spots. For those of us who are merely observing, the results could be spectacular.

Montoya on Kurt Busch

Juan Pablo Montoya's return to the Brickyard is just one of several great subplots to this year's Indianapolis 500. Fellow former winner Jacques Villeneuve is also returning to the Hoosier State for the first time (in an Indycar) since he won the race in 1995, while Kurt Busch is seeking to become just the fourth driver to contest both Indy and NASCAR's 600-miler at Charlotte on the same weekend.

Montoya has no doubts about the NASCAR star's ability to adapt.

"I think the ovals are completely different [to preparing for road courses]," he says. "The ovals are a lot more simple. And the experience he has with ovals... he's been to the Brickyard before. I know it's different [in NASCAR], but he tested the car last year.

"The biggest thing is the comfort level once the car starts stepping out, because a Cup car is a lot more forgiving. A Cup car gets sideways, but 90 per cent of the time you can go [imitates a lazy steering correction] and keep going."