August 6, 2008
By Doug Demmons
Juan Pablo Montoya's "Chase or Bust" year that team owner Chip Ganassi proclaimed before the season has gone bust.
Pocono, for instance, is likely to not be remembered very fondly by the No. 42 team. On Sunday Montoya started 13th but almost immediately fell a lap down when he had to pit because of a loose plug wire.
He worked his way back through the field but his engine blew on lap 146. He ended up 40th and fell three places in the standings to 25th.
But even that was better than his first race at Pocono this year where he exited after he hit a spinning Clint Bowyer and his Texaco Dodge ignited like a Roman candle. It was the sort of wreck that makes you a YouTube sensation in all the wrong ways.
At Indy he was an early casualty of the Trail of Tattered Tires.
The promising start to his season that saw him contending for the Chase and nearly winning at Talladega really went south after Charlotte, after Jimmy Elledge was fired and Montoya got his third crew chief of the season. In the last 10 races Montoya has finished 30th or worse eight times.
A good bit of that is due to the ongoing dysfunction at Chip Ganassi Racing, the organization that closed down Dario Franchitti’s team and laid off 71 employees after gambling on sponsorship dollars coming in.
So where does that leave Montoya? Does he wait and hope that Ganassi rediscovers the mojo it lost after Sterling Marlin’s 2002 season? Does he become the next one to lose a sponsor tired of running 35th?
Montoya has a lot of loyalty to Ganassi. They won a lot in open-wheel together so he may very well give it another year.
Or perhaps he is waiting to see if the Breakfast Summit at Daytona -- where Ganassi and partner Felix Sabates broke bread with Cal Wells and Rob Kauffman of Michael Waltrip Racing -- results in a merger of some kind.
The breakfast sparked a torrent of speculation about Ganassi and Waltrip forming one four-car team and Ganassi switching to Toyota. That makes sense on some levels but you have to wonder whether two struggling teams can equal one successful team.
The short answer is probably not. Neither team seems to have the management model in place to succeed in NASCAR, where the slightest organizational weakness can get you culled from the herd with brutal efficiency. But a merger might give them both enough breathing room to develop such a model.
In the meantime some very talented drivers, like Montoya and Reed Sorenson, are going to pay the price. But that’s not anything new. Ganassi Racing has gone through a lot of drivers -- Jason Leffler, Jimmy Spencer, Casey Mears, Jamie McMurray, Franchitti and Marlin. Just last year David Stremme was cut loose to make room for Franchitti.
Montoya would be wise to abandon ship before his brand is tarnished irreparably and he ends up contemplating his future like Franchitti.
The fourth team at Richard Childress Racing would be a good fit.
Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow
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