Montoya: Ganassi need more time

The former Champ Car and Indy 500 champion with Ganassi had seen a trend of good results take him as high as 12th in the championship but two difficult races recently have dropped him out of the top twelve in the standing.

Montoya has said he was disappointed with last week's race at Darlington as he and his team are still puzzled as to why they ran well in practice but then lost the good handling of their car in the race that they finished in 23rd place.

He believes he has to find those answers with his team in order to move forward as his relationship with his new crew chief Jimmy Elledge is still in its early stages.

"I'll tell you the truth, we were very disappointed with Darlington," Montoya said. "We were actually really good in practice, had a great car and then the green flag dropped and all of a sudden it was a completely different car.

"We don't understand. We're trying to figure out what went wrong, what changes we did that really affected the car for the race and if we can understand that it's really going to help us."

The Colombian says he is missing something in order to be able to have good outright speed like some of his rivals. He claims he still has to develop a good level of confidence with his team when working on setting up the car and making changes to improve its handling during races.

"I still feel that I'm missing something," Montoya added. "I still feel we need to work harder.

"Some weeks I'm thinking, there's some guys that go out there at tracks that you know, hard racetracks that they just go out and just blast a great lap out of the box, straight out of the truck they can really put up a good time, straight out and good speed.

"I think we're still missing that and the confidence of knowing how far we can go on how to predict the car a little bit better. I think from where we were last year we've gone a long way but I think there's still a little bit of way to go."

Despite the recent setbacks Montoya remains faithful to Ganassi's NASCAR operation. He still believes there is no reason why the team cannot translate their success from IndyCars and Grand Am into NASCAR and is adamant they will be fighting for the championship within the next two years.

"The reason I came to NASCAR with him is because I believe he could give me the tools to get to win and you've got to be realistic; we're not there yet, we're going in the right direction, and it just takes a little bit of time," he said.

"I think within a couple of years we're probably going to be fighting for championships, hopefully earlier than that. You look at this year; we've been close to the top twelve this year and we have a shot at it but I don't want to be close to running twelfth place.

"I want to be, if we're getting to that Chase, we want to have a chance at winning the championship."

Montoya is 16th in the Sprint Cup Series drivers' standing, by far the best place of the Ganassi drivers in the points.