The band of multiple Indy 500 winners is a select one. And as you’re no doubt aware it was added to recently, by one Juan Pablo Montoya. He joined it in unique style too, not only in his impressive combative drive to win this year’s Blue Riband event but also in that in so doing he set a record gap between two Indy 500 victories of 15 years.
And the gap tells us something, as it contains some adventures. Not least an F1 career, then seven and a bit years racing (mainly) in the midfield of NASCAR which did absurdly little for one of his abilities. Even more absurdly that F1 career lasted a mere five and a half seasons and worse after the split neither he nor the sport had a backwards glance seemingly. Which led into his extended spell in NASCAR, possibly as a sort of rebound. Last year he at last returned to single seaters in IndyCars and while there was an understandable period of removing the rust we now are witnessing much of the brilliant driver of old.
Better late than never, but whatever is the case ever since he left F1 I deeply regretted it, viewed it as a great loss, as well as feel that the split shamed the sport much more than Juan. He was certainly good entertainment value and had FOM got around to giving us a choice of following individual cars around during a race on the TV feed in Montoya’s time there would have been little discussion of which one you’d have picked. He was possessed of a buoyant personality too which was especially refreshing in a rather straight-laced (on and off the track) F1 age. But it was about more than that. Montoya’s was a towering natural talent and a staggering spirit; that could, maybe should, have swept most things before it. Yet somehow the attendant sense from a few in F1 in his spell there was that somehow they didn’t like his sort around here.
For a time it looked like anything was possible for him. When he came into the sport his promise was considerable. Williams had long had extremely high hopes, to the point that it happily dropped the himself highly-promising Jenson Button to clear a space for him. He had as mentioned an Indy 500 triumph already, along with a CART championship from his rookie year the campaign before and he likely would had had two titles from two but for poor mechanical reliability in his second season wherein he led more laps than anyone else.
Moreover those who’d tracked him in the States, just like those who’d witnessed him in the junior formulae, rated Montoya off the chart. His CART engineer Morris Nunn – the veteran of F1 with Ensign and by this point was one of the leading figures of US racing – for one was emphatically of this view.
“In all my years in racing I’ve never seen anyone like this kid before. When we started testing on the ovals he was unbelievably quick, but I was sure he was set for a huge accident. I mean, you just don’t get a car sideways on an oval…
“I kept trying to slow him down, but nothing worked, and eventually I stopped worrying about it. Nothing fazed him, and I began to realise he really was that good, that confident…I thought for sure he was World Champion material.”
I recall indeed in his first CART season when all visited the spectacular Elkhart Lake course. Around the back of the track there is a turn called ‘the kink’, which just like the Masta version on the original Spa is a name that sells it well short. It was the turn like the Masta that was the one in the series that was the most daunting; the biggest badge of honour; that almost all of the time was just, tantalisingly, short of being doable flat out. All others indeed had a quick, almost imperceptible, breath on the throttle each time through. Montoya however, every time, went through there without so much as the tiniest alteration of his engine note.
Montoya leads Schumacher in the 2002 Brazilian GP (© Williams)
When he made his bow in F1 in 2001 things continued that way too initially. Of course we all remember his inimitable calling card slammed down in his third race when at Interlagos after an early safety car he ambushed the imperious Michael Schumacher for the lead under braking at turn one from a mile back, and he looked well on course for victory before an errant back-marker in Jos Verstappen wiped him out. It heralded a freshman season that contained more stunning overtakes (he made a similar pass of Schumi at Indianapolis), equally stunning pace as well as his first Grand Prix win – and there would have been at least a couple more but for technical woes. All of this more than made up for the odd scrape in there, particularly concentrated early in the year. Without exaggeration by the campaign’s conclusion many thought that finally the man that would get under the haughty Schumacher’s skin, perhaps even depose him, had arrived in the sport.
It hardly could have been less congruous therefore that a mere four and half years on in mid-2006 it was all over for him in F1 and to neither Montoya’s nor the sport’s conspicuous regret. And little did we know it at the time but it was the frustration of 2001 that was to be more of a portent.
Whatever else happened it was clear by the end that Montoya was thoroughly fed up of F1. This it seems was related to a variety of things. Not least that the sport at that time was hardly suited for racer such as him. While according to Clip the Apex’s stats F1 had between 30 and 40 passes per dry race on average in the 1980s by 2005 it had sunk to fewer than 10. As rare as hen’s teeth in other words. One year Montoya noted that in the whole campaign even he’d only passed four people…
In all my years in racing I’ve never seen anyone like this kid before…I thought for sure he was World Champion material
Morris Nunn, CART engineer
“You can’t pass anybody in F1; it’s not racing anymore” he complained on the way out. And it was a point he returned to in coming years when even in the NASCAR midfield he insisted that he did not miss F1: “a Cup car doesn’t do anything incredible – but to race one is fun, because you’re always in a race with someone, and it’s possible to overtake.”
F1’s highly political environment was not to his taste either. “That’s what really drove me away from Formula One was the politics” he said some time later, and that much of prevailing in the game is about getting into the right team, then getting into the right position in the right team, turned him off too: “every sport you do there’s politics, in Formula One the politics are in the team not in the sport and I didn’t like that”. It therefore is likely no coincidence that he found the simpler America racing environment much more to his liking. “It’s a different wold, it’s more relaxed”.
But there were peculiar matters related to that 2006 season too, not least the underwhelming McLaren: “The car drove me to boredom…Fighting for fifth place is no fun.”
He went on: “Something I really hated, too, was the change (for 2006) from the V10s to the V8s – it was like going from an F3000 car to an F3 car. We lost 200 horsepower – and kept the same tyres, same chassis, same aero, same everything!”
In a more general sense Juan suffered to some extent from an accident of birth in that he was around F1 – returning to the point about needing to be in the right place to win – at the precise spell of sweeping Schumacher-Ferrari hegemony. That which had rather a lot stacked in its favour, including bespoke Bridgestone tyres and a sympathetic relationship with the FIA and with Bernie (we found out later the Scuderia had a veto on technical regs). And in time Montoya grew very conscious of this, as well as was given some cause to wonder just how many people he had to beat to win out in F1.
To give probably the most egregious example in Malaysia in 2002 at the start Montoya sought to pass Schumi around the outside of turn one – doing nothing beyond trying to lead a motor race. Schumi under pressure understeered into him which resulted in the Ferrari losing its front wing. A few laps later all were astonished when the stewards in response first investigated an ‘incident involving Car 6 (Montoya)’ then punished him with a drive through penalty. It likely is the most ridiculous decision I’ve ever witnessed from F1’s stewards (and it has a few rivals) and it seemed quintessential of an era in which Schumi despite being fond of pushing the envelope was apparently untouchable by those handing out sanction, certainly not to the extent that others were. As was pointed out the stewards didn’t even say it was an ‘incident involving Car 1 and Car 6’…
Montoya later alleged that there was one particular steward who whenever he was on duty gave him a penalty every time. Not for nothing when he stepped away from F1 while he still had some seat options he said that only a Ferrari drive would have tempted him to stay.
But while we can dwell on Montoya’s disillusionment with F1, F1 didn’t do much to bring him back onside. Indeed it struck me that many of those in the fraternity seemed to make a conscious attempt to run him out of town.
Montoya celebrating his second Indy 500 win – 2015 (© IndyCar)
While one such as Montoya always had plenty of fans he was rather the Marmite racing driver, with about as many viewing him as a rock ape and not being shy in saying so.
Perhaps the beginnings of the backlash against him were evidenced by the words of David Coulthard after Montoya in the 2002 Nurburgring race with tyres graining disastrously had spun into him, removing them both. Coulthard spat afterwards that Montoya “needs to calm it down”, “is all over the place” and that “it is hardly surprising he hasn’t won more races” (if you fancy a giggle check out David Coulthard’s autobiography ‘It Is What It Is’ – he, possibly minded that he was booted out of McLaren to make way for the Colombian, aims several embittered barbs at Montoya, mainly about his weight, and then apparently without irony says in response to something-or-other Montoya said about him: “I wouldn’t stop so low as to be that childish. I pride myself on being a consummate professional and always coolly diplomatic”. Really). The volume of the doubters grew over time, and the next year after the Monaco race wherein Montoya finally claimed his second Grand Prix win the legendary scribe Nigel Roebuck was provoked to write: “quite honestly, I’ve been a bit mystified by some of the criticism levelled at Montoya (some of it from folk within his own team)”.
Then a couple of rounds later at the Nurburgring following an incident in which Schumi spun when Montoya was passing him (and not even the German held Montoya to blame) Ferrari technical director Ross Brawn launched an astonishing attack on the Colombian: “It was mad of Montoya. He could have taken both of them off the circuit. It was a very crude overtaking move and he has done it several times before. He is not a classy driver in that respect.” It seemed that by now Juan was on a hiding to nothing.
More generally Montoya and Schumi did not see eye to eye, Montoya admitting that they virtually never shared a word, and he almost alone among F1 drivers of the time wasn’t reverential of Schumi’s abilities – “everyone really respected him and I didn’t” he noted years later. On the contrary he saw the chief discriminator of his success as the advantages around him already mentioned. Schumi perhaps in return often was rather snide about Montoya, such as in Monaco in 2004 when in the safety car snake Schumi decided to get heat in his brakes by accelerating then braking sharply…to the point of locking his tyres up…and in the tunnel of all places, the lapped (as earlier delayed) Montoya behind with nowhere to go collided with him which pitched him out, Schumi decided later to mutter about being taken out by “a backmarker”. And perhaps that Schumacher was such a towering figure in the sport at the time, his words tending to travel far and carry much weight, was particularly bad news for Juan. Perhaps also that he stood alone on this matter made it easy to dismiss Montoya as a stroppy outcast.
Schumacher and Montoya during the start of the 2003 Malaysian GP (© Ferrari)
Perhaps too the template that Schumi provided more broadly, all ultra-professional, ultra-fit, PR-perfect, every waking task it seemed devoted to the end of winning races and championships without the slightest deviation, meant that by now some assumed it was the only way to succeed. That one such as Montoya – the freehand artist, emotional, sometimes a little tubby by ridiculous F1 standards – was by now swimming against the current. Whatever was the case many in the sport when rating Montoya became rather like the po-faced school headmistress writing a report card – ‘slightly disappointing’…‘didn’t quite fulfil his potential’…
But while his detractors, a bit like with Jean Alesi, liked to call Montoya fast but wild, and too volatile to really prevail in F1, just like with Alesi this tag sold him short. In both cases they were more consistent than most gave them credit for, and demonstrated that if given the tools they could get the job done.
And in Montoya’s case we saw it properly in 2003. That season he ended up just 12 points shy of being world champion (that year he also scored eight podium finishes in a row; so much for inconsistency), and looking at the detail the title was well within grasp. On two occasions his engine went pop while leading, so that’s 20 points right there. In Malaysia he got nil points after someone knocked off his rear wing at turn one. In the USA he lost points after a dubious penalty for colliding with Rubens Barrichello (though equally there likely would have been more points for him in Australia and Canada had he not spun in both). More broadly the Williams didn’t really get properly up to speed until round six of 16 in Austria. Then there was the business with the Michelin tyres that followed the Hungarian round…
The beginning of the end was his move to McLaren. That it happened at all owed something to his volatile nature, as he ended up leaving the Williams environment that seemed perfect for him when he had a set-to with the team over strategy in the 2003 French race. Ron Dennis, sharp as always, pounced at that precise moment and signed Montoya up for 2005. Dennis spoke with optimism of how with Ayrton Senna he had a good record of working with fiery latinos; Montoya turned up at Woking looking fitter than he’d ever been and things looked good. But it all went wrong rapidly. Some said that him injuring his shoulder after just two races at his new team – which necessitated him missing the next two and indeed dogged him all year – was already the point of no return. The official line was that the injury was sustained on the tennis court but rumour persisted that it was done falling off a mountain bike.
Montoya raced for McLaren from 2005 to 2006 (© Asier Arco)
And with parallels of Fernando Alonso a couple of years later he found the shift from a hardy collective happy to tolerate his ‘fiery latin’ foibles so long as he delivered to one more sober (you might even say prissy) at Woking far from straightforward. Montoya also always felt he was the ‘other driver’ alongside the ensconced Kimi Raikkonen at the peak of his powers, and that his efforts, even though in 2005 he won three times, never were appreciated . “There was always a ‘but’ at McLaren” he noted, even after victory. Like Alonso too he found Dennis sometimes a bewildering presence.
Still after his difficult 2005 most felt Montoya was well-set to step on particularly as when that campaign got into its latter part he was matching, and sometimes beating, Raikkonen. But in 2006 it all fell apart. The understeering car didn’t at all suit his style and he made matters worse with a series of spins and crashes (curiously in F1 he never managed to entirely shake his tendency for errors; curious as it’s something that rarely has been a feature of his time in American single seaters). Then at Indianapolis – ironically the scene of his recent triumph – it ended. He was involved in a multi-car pile-up at the start that removed him and Raikkonen from the race. Many blamed Montoya and it seemed the straw that broke the camel’s back. Indeed one McLaren insider before even the cars had been recovered told a journalist: “That’s it, Montoya’s out; Pedro (de la Rosa) is in for France.” And he was. Montoya, possibly jumping before he was pushed, soon announced he was off to hook up with his old CART boss Chip Ganassi in NASCAR.
So while many of those arguably more reliable but certainly less talented of his contemporaries – Nick Heidfeld, David Coulthard, Giancarlo Fisichella; the list is a lengthy one – had extended F1 careers Montoya was chased out of the door, only aged 30. And I know from all of those which one I’d choose to watch. It seemed that a generation or so on from Ronnie Petersen, Gilles Villeneuve and Keke Rosberg F1 had forgotten how to love the free spirit. And in this F1 was the loser.
