Why new Montoya is IndyCar's real deal

Immediately after winning the IndyCar season-opener at St Petersburg a couple of weeks ago, Juan Pablo Montoya found himself having to ponder the question of whether he is - or has been at any point during his motorsport career - a jerk.

Even by the relatively relaxed standards of the IndyCar paddock, this is not a normal line of questioning in a post-race press conference.

Montoya largely brushed it off, although the fact that Tony Kanaan had described the Colombian's victory celebration with fans as something that wouldn't have happened in the CART days almost gave the inquiry a kind of unconventional validity.

That it was asked at all says something about the journey that Montoya has been on, and which threatens to hit a new height just as he reaches a point where many other drivers of his experience are starting to slow down. But understanding it requires a quick rewind.

To hear the team patriarch tell it, Penske's recent driver acquisition policy has been a tale of opportunism writ large.

It's a scenario familiar to anyone who has ever played the game Football Manager. The team is well-balanced, you're just within your budget for wages, and then an irresistible winger that you don't really need becomes available on the cheap, and the next thing you know, you're unveiling him to your fans.

Simon Pagenaud, Roger Penske says, was signed because he was available, even though the team had no plans to run a fourth car in 2015, and didn't have a sponsor in place to pay for it. (There is still no backer in place, although one is expected to be announced imminently.)

According to Penske, drivers of Pagenaud's ilk don't appear on the market all that often, so there's no point sitting on one's hands when they do.

Montoya looked on course to make it two from two in 2015 at NOLA © LAT

His reasoning is easy to follow: Pagenaud never finished lower than fifth in the points during his three years at Schmidt, and was the only driver mathematically capable of denying Penske's Will Power or Helio Castroneves the title at last year's final round.

And if that wasn't enough, Gil de Ferran - himself a Penske alumnus who had also been Pagenaud's boss and team-mate in the ALMS - had been advocating for the 30-year-old behind the scenes for some time. There could scarcely have been more stars aligned in the Frenchman's favour.

Penske uses the same justification to explain his recruitment of Montoya a year earlier, in similar circumstances: the team had scaled back to two full-time cars in 2013 (with a part-time third car for AJ Allmendinger), but had no plans or funding for a third full-time entry for 2014 until Montoya's NASCAR deal with Ganassi was allowed to lapse.

From the outside, that seemed like more of a gamble. Where it's easy to make a case for Pagenaud being a driver just entering his peak, applying the same argument to Montoya 18 months ago might have required a little more creativity. By now the reasons are well-documented: his age, his long sabbatical from single-seaters, his conditioning, and maybe even his motivation.

Montoya had already achieved more in one career than many drivers do in three, and one only needed to look at Rubens Barrichello to see that succeeding in modern IndyCar requires more than a strong CV and the desire to push retirement back just another year or two.

The work required to get Montoya to the point where he could win from pole at Pocono last year was immense on all fronts. His own application is easily underestimated because so much of the effort was invested away from the public eye.

His NASCAR weight wasn't on the Tony Stewart spectrum, but it was heavier than ideal for single-seaters. He began addressing that, along with the other elements of physical conditioning that are specific to heavy single-seaters, as soon as he signed with Penske towards the end of 2013, months before he actually sat in the car.

Formula 1 stint came to an early end after tumultuous time with McLaren © LAT

His initial tests were rusty, as were his first races, but progress was steady. By the end of Montoya's comeback season he had emerged as a championship dark horse, and on that basis alone, Penske's roll of the dice seemed to have been worth it.

On the strength of the IndyCar 2015 season-opener at St Petersburg two weeks ago though, the real payoff might still be on the horizon. Montoya ended last season relatively satisfied with his comeback year, while openly aware of his shortcomings: street courses in general; street course qualifying in particular. The winter, he vowed, would be spent addressing that.

The promise to study weaknesses in the off-season is a commonly-heard refrain, but in this case the results were immediate. Montoya was the lowest-qualifying of the four Penske drivers - he was the four in a 1-2-3-4 on the grid - but he was only 0.16s off pole, and 0.3s ahead of the car immediately behind him.

In the race, he was camped behind leader Will Power in the penultimate stint, capitalised on a slow pitstop for the Australian to move into P1, and then despite being on the harder-compound tyres, he kept the defending champion comfortably at bay during the final stanza to open his season with a victory.

To attribute the win to Power's misfortune in the pits would be incorrect and unfair: Montoya's afternoon was defined by a confidence that he was still yet to rediscover at this point 12 months ago. The March 2014-spec Montoya would not have won that race.

Part of his revival has been the consequence of blowing out some rust, but it also owes much to Montoya figuring out how to make the DW12 chassis work for him. Penske has an open data policy within its team, so he'd been able to see what Power and Castroneves were doing all along.

Incredible rookie campaign in CART was the launchpad for Montoya's career... © LAT

The problem last year was that he struggled to feel comfortable when he applied their set-ups. But over the course of the season he worked out how to adapt the car to his taste, meaning that he started this year with a far stronger sense for how to tame the DW12.

"If you went and looked at my set-up against the other three [Penske] cars, you would think I'm completely insane," he said after his St Pete victory. "But I won the race, so I'm not that crazy, I guess."

Last weekend's race at NOLA was almost as impressive, even if it didn't yield the same result. He enjoyed a stroke of good luck in qualifying, where he'd been eliminated in the first round, only to be handed pole when qualifying was cancelled due to a thunderstorm, meaning that the grid was set by championship points.

Twenty-four hours later he drove a near-perfect race, only to be denied back-to-back wins by a proliferation of cautions.

The big question is, where will it all lead? Early signs point to the 2015 champion coming from within the Penske camp, but within that group, Montoya needs to be considered a genuine contender.

Granted, it usually doesn't take a huge leap to declare that the current points leader might be in the frame at the end of the year. But his team-mates have set the bar high, and there were no guarantees this time last year that Montoya would ever reach a level where he could pose a genuine threat to Power et al week in, week out. Now, he is in the process of proving that he can.

This is not a case of Montoya dusting off some old skills. It's a whole different iteration of him as a competitor. At 39 years old, with all that he has already done and so many reasons to be tempted by a lifestyle where his biggest decision on any given day is whether to go out on his boat or fly a model plane, he is still evolving as a race driver.

And if that 'non-jerk' celebration at St Pete was any guide, he is still evolving out of the cockpit as well. The Penske drive lit a competitive fire underneath him in a way that no other opportunity likely could have done at this point in his career.

...but Montoya's initial return to the US, in NASCAR, was largely unsuccessful © LAT

Montoya's transition from flamboyant racer with little patience for the fluff that surrounds the sport to easygoing chillmeister has been gradual, and it began sometime before his arrival in IndyCar.

But it's fundamental to why he has re-emerged as such an effective racer: he has found that sweet spot where he is relaxed about what he's already achieved, and yet still has an ambition worth chasing.

And critically, he is having fun. Both he and Penske used that word last year when discussing the likelihood of Montoya continuing with the team into 2015, and you could make a strong case for it being the foundation of his entire IndyCar campaign. If the fun ever goes away, you can expect Montoya himself to swiftly follow.

Until then, the reblossoming of Montoya is shaping up as one of the great storylines of 2015. All of that speed and hustle that made him one of the most exciting F1 drivers of the past 20 years is still there, only now it's reinforced by a maturity that some thought stood in the way of his ever becoming a world champion.

We'll never know of course, and nor will we ever know whether he would have evolved in the same way had he not stepped back from McLaren in favour of a move to the US.

The one thing we can say for certain was that as good as Montoya was when he left the Formula 1 paddock - and he was very, very good - he still had room to grow. Closing out his career by winning the IndyCar championship sounds ridiculously audacious; the stuff of Hollywood.

It would be almost as outrageous as winning the CART title as a rookie.