Ganassi want Montoya to race soon
Chip Ganassi Racing are set on entering Juan Pablo Montoya into as many races as possible before the end of the 2006 NASCAR season, team owner Chip Ganassi said on Sunday
Montoya is due to have his first test session with the Ganassi team on Monday at Talladega, after agreeing with the McLaren Formula One team on an early termination of his contract.
"Everything is taken care of now, and he's going to test tomorrow in Talladega," team owner Chip Ganassi told reporters on Sunday.
"He's excited about it. We want to get him in as many races as we can the rest of the year, and if that's ARCA, Busch or Cup it really doesn't matter.
"Whatever presents itself at the time we're going to go after it. We're going to take it one step at a time.
"I don't think Talladega is a good place to start, but I think it presents itself tomorrow (Monday) very quickly, and it gets it out of the way."
McLaren team boss Ron Dennis said last month at the Turkish Grand Prix that they were willing to release Montoya from his Formula One contract, which was due to expire at the end of this year, if they did not have to continue paying his salary.
"We're going to get in a testing program," added Ganassi. "I don't know if it's going to reward him much this season, but I think four or five races into next season he'll be happy we did it.
"We've been working on it for about two months, and we found out we were going to do it about two days ago," Ganassi said.
"It came down to if something was going to happen (this year) it needed to happen. Daytona is the first race of 2007, but you have to do a lot of testing in this system to learn other tracks, other procedures and that's what we want to expose him to."
Ganassi said he was surprised by the publicity surrounding Montoya's switch.
"Yeah, it's good," Ganassi said. "It's interesting. I'm happy for him. Next year is going to be a lot of fun. I'm sure there will be speed bumps along the way, but it'll be fun."
Be part of the Autosport community
Join the conversationShare Or Save This Story
Subscribe and access Autosport.com with your ad-blocker.
From Formula 1 to MotoGP we report straight from the paddock because we love our sport, just like you. In order to keep delivering our expert journalism, our website uses advertising. Still, we want to give you the opportunity to enjoy an ad-free and tracker-free website and to continue using your adblocker.
Top Comments