Montoya’s Grand Day at the Beach

Once again, it appears that Chip Ganassi, champ car racing’s developer of champions, has taken on another project for Formula One.

The way Juan Pablo Montoya, his rookie CART FedEx driver from Colombia, dominated the 25th annual Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach before close to 100,000 fans on Sunday, it will probably be only time--perhaps a year or two--before he returns to his roots in F1. As did his predecessor at Target/Chip Ganassi Racing, Alex Zanardi.

Montoya, 23, came to the team this year in what appeared to be a trade of sorts. After winning the European Formula 3000 championship, Montoya became the official test driver for Frank Williams’ team, then got permission to drive for Ganassi. Zanardi went in the other direction. After winning his second straight PPG Cup championship, he returned to F1 with Williams.

Long Beach was only Montoya’s third CART race, making him the quickest rookie winner since Formula One champion Nigel Mansell came to CART in 1993 and won his first race in Australia.

The win was Ganassi’s fourth straight at Long Beach. Jimmy Vasser won in 1996 and Zanardi in 1997 and 1998. In all three years, the Long Beach winner went on to win the CART championship.

Only one other team has done better at Long Beach. Galles-Kraco won five straight with Al Unser Jr. in 1989-91 and Danny Sullivan in 1992.

“Long Beach has been very good to us, which is sort of obvious, isn’t it?” Ganassi said. “I’m not going to get into comparing Alex and Juan, but needless to say, I’m very pleased with the way both of them have driven.

“We were expecting something like this from Juan today. We did not give him a very good car at [season opener] Homestead [Fla.] and we let him run out of gas at Japan. Today, he drove the way we expected.”

The race also served as redemption of sorts. Montoya was fined $5,000 and placed on probation last week in Japan after an altercation with Michael Andretti during practice for the race in Motegi.

He led the final 40 laps in his Reynard-Honda, and won by 2.8 seconds over Dario Franchitti of Scotland, a margin made closer because of a yellow caution flag with eight laps remaining that brought the 18 finishers closer together. Franchitti was also driving a Reynard-Honda.

Once Tony Kanaan, the pole-sitter, slammed into a tire barrier at Turn 6 while leading on lap 45, Montoya took over and had no problem leading the parade the rest of the way. In the final 37 laps, there was not a single position change among the top five drivers--Montoya, Franchitti, Bryan Herta, Adrian Fernandez and Christian Fittipaldi.

After a ragged, scraggly start that should have embarrassed CART officials, the most excitement of the boring 1-hour 45-minute parade occurred when Herta made a bold pass to move from third to first as the leaders reached the first turn.

“I have to give all credit to the Ford Cosworth engine for giving me my run past Tony and Dario [Franchitti],” said Herta after finishing third. “It was great, but it didn’t last long.

“I love this place and this race. Considering the problems we had this morning in warm-up, this feels good to get third place. We had a fuel pickup problem in our primary car and I had to jump to the backup car. That was a real scrabble for our crew. But luckily, despite only getting in a few laps in the morning, we ended up with a good car.”

On the second lap, Kanaan recaptured the lead from Herta, and a lap later, Franchitti moved ahead of him. Montoya was running fourth at the time.

“The start was OK,” the winner said. “Bryan got by and later he would be the hardest guy to pass. Tony [Kanaan] had a great car as well. But this weekend it finally all came together for us. Now I’m just going to try to keep on winning. I want to thank the guys on the Target team that gave me such a good car, and I want to thank the people of Colombia who follow what I do.”

On lap 22, Montoya passed Herta to take over third place and on lap 31 he passed Franchitti and set out to chase down Kanaan. He never caught him, but he pressured Kanaan, last year’s rookie of the year, into a mistake.

“I am very disappointed, but you learn from your mistakes,” said the 24-year-old Brazilian. “The track was breaking up and I just ran off line a little bit and lost it. It was my mistake.

“Some times you learn the hard way. What happened today hurt, but I proved to myself that I can run up front.”

Kanaan, who won the pole with a lap of 107.454 mph on Saturday, finished 22nd. He is still winless in CART competition.

Franchitti, driving a backup car after wrecking his primary car in practice, said he was pleased to come away with second place points.

“I gave it everything I had, but we didn’t have the car to win today,” said the Team Kool Green driver who won three races last year. “The first stint [before a pit stop] was the worst because I used up the rear tires. After that, the car was better and the three of us ran away. But we were lacking just a little bit compared to Tony and Juan. Still, it was good points, a podium finish and we’ll take it and move on to Nazareth.”

The next CART race is May 2 at Nazareth, Pa.

The other exciting moment came early in the race when Paul Tracy clipped a barrier just enough to knock off a banner, which caught on Richie Hearn’s car. Hearn did a masterful job of one-handed driving while he tried to get rid of the banner. He succeeded, but in the process also lost his right mirror.

Five yellow caution flags for a total of 19 of the 85 laps helped keep the average speed to a slow 87.915 mph. His average for green flag laps was 102.414 mph.

Canadian Greg Moore, who finished eighth, maintained his PPG Cup lead with 39 points, closely followed by Fernandez and Gil de Ferran with 33 each, and Andretti with 32.

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FINISH LINE

1. Juan Montoya

2. Dario Franchitti

3. Bryan Herta

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GOLDEN TOUCH

Chip Ganassi has a way of choosing winners. Page 8