Montoya takes Cup rookie honours

The Colombian achieved most of his goals for his first full season in the Nextel Cup Series, taking his first win at Infineon Raceway and scoring a second place at Indy as his best result of the year in an oval.

He also led three races and started twice from the front row of the grid.

"I think for the record books it's pretty good that I won the Raybestos Rookie of the Year," Montoya said. "I think I've been the rookie before in a lot of series but being a rookie with the experience I had it's very different.

"I had no stock car experience but I think from my open-wheel background I raced pretty much about everything you can race.

"I think it's pretty cool. I think it's good for the team. I think it's something to cheer about for them. But I think more important is how the performance of the team came up through the whole year. From where we started to where we finished there is a big difference."

Montoya admitted that making the transition from open-wheel racing to the heavier stock cars has been more difficult than he probably anticipated. He says that getting his car to do what he wants it to has been a struggle, as much as getting used to the fact that his car would rarely maintain the same balance on a long run.

"Coming here, getting back to the ovals, getting into a big car, big horsepower, very little grip, I'll tell you it's a handful," Montoya added. "It's really a handful. In open wheel when you're good you have a lot of grip. The car does whatever you want it to.

"It does it all the time where here, when you're good, it'll do that for about 10 laps. It keeps you busy."

Montoya's crew chief Donnie Wingo praised his driver's final race where he had to drive a very loose car in the closing stages. He said Montoya has gotten increasingly comfortable with the extreme handling characteristics of the car, shifting from a tendency to run the car with more rear-end grip to driving it looser.

"I think we had some ups and downs," Wingo said. "I think today being able to run it as loose as he could run it is a big improvement from where we started. At the beginning of the year we were really, really tight and today we were just too loose.

"We struggled a little bit with it today but all in all we had a good car and everybody did a good job."

The Ganassi driver finished the season 20th in the points as the lead driver from his team, also maintaining his top 35 status in the owner points standings as he enters his second full season at NASCAR's top level.

Next year some of his former open-wheel rivals like Jacques Villeneuve, Dario Franchitti, and Patrick Carpentier will be trying to follow in his footsteps to take the Rookie of the Year title.