To get a NASCAR championship Juan Pablo Montoya needs to win a race

Despite crew-chief, Brian Pattie’s inspired strategy of consistency to get Juan Pablo into the Chase for the Sprint Cup, winless Montoya knows he’s got to get a race victory if he has any chance to win the Championship.

After four races in NASCAR’s version of the playoffs, with four top-five finishes, Montoya is still losing ground to the Hendrick Motorsports drivers, Jimmie Johnson and Mark Martin.

He came into the interview room, after leading 78-laps at Fontana and said unhappily, "it's incredible. I have four top-fives in a row and I'm losing points to the leader."


What has hurt Montoya the most was the lack of the ten bonus points for wins before the reset. Martin started the Chase with a 40-point advantage and Johnson had 30-points on Montoya. Now he’s 58 points behind the new leader, Johnson.

“To be honest with you, you look before the Chase; we were running second at Bristol when I had a flat tire. We finished third in Atlanta,” Montoya said.

“There are races that, apart from Richmond, we were out there. We were a top-five car and we finished sixth or seventh. We did a lot of that,” Montoya said in a pre-race press conference at Lowe’s Speedway on a rainy-Thursday.

The pit lane speeding penalty, which likely cost him the victory after dominating the Brickyard 400, was too painful to bring up again also.

Whether Montoya wins or not, it’s still a numbers game. He’s got the best Chevrolet outside of the Hendrick group.


Co-owner, Felix Sabates speculated that his driver might have won five or six races in a Hendrick car. “Right now you look at it, it is two Hendrick cars, myself and then two more Hendrick cars, or one is Stewart, sorry, not a Hendrick car,” Montoya laughed.

Still, Montoya gets serious with the tantalizing prospect of a NASCAR Championship so near, yet, so far.

“Right now we have a Target car and a Chevy car and it is great. I can’t complain. I was happy last year when I was finishing 15th and right now we finished third and I am p*** off.”