Montoya puzzled by Vegas form

Although temperatures were hotter last weekend than in late January when the Colombian set a new track record at the track, he was surprised at just how different his car was since his first laps of practice on Friday.

Even if it was the overall trend for the whole field, all the Ganassi drivers struggled through the weekend with very loose cars, which caused both Montoya and his teammate Reed Sorenson to have incidents in the opening practice session.

"Yeah, it was weird because we tested there and we were so strong in the test and it was actually very disappointing from the beginning of the weekend," Montoya said at Phoenix where he has been testing since Monday.

"We crashed the car on Friday, not even up to speed. We run half decent on Saturday and on Sunday we actually started really bad. We went a lap down really fast. We were always in the back of the line.

"We actually came into the pits, we were making camber changes, you know, big changes where you normally wouldn't do that in the race."

Although Montoya and his team were able to improve the handling of the car during the race to get back on the lead lap and finish in the top 20, the Ganassi driver says maybe a combination of track temperature and tyres led to his car having very poor grip and making it nearly undriveable.

"Normally there's a lot of grip out there," Montoya added. "Race day was a little better. But the first two days, especially when it was hotter, there's just no grip. You know, when you have no grip, you start having a lot of issues.

"Our car worked really well when he had had a lot of grip. When we had little grip, we would really struggle. It was a combination of everything, you know. The tyre seemed to be very edgy.

"But, you know, we didn't really have any tyre issues, to tell you the truth, in our cars. It was just more lack of grip. And it was a real handful."

Montoya finished 19th last Sunday at Las Vegas, right behind his teammate Reed Sorenson, while Dario Franchitti also suffered with lack of grip with his rear tyres and finished 33rd and two laps down.