Heat is intense at Brickyard practice

Reporting from Indianapolis — 

As if maneuvering around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in a 3,400-pound stock car wasn’t tough enough, Mother Nature tested NASCAR’s best even more Friday.

On a hot, sticky day with temperatures in the mid-90s, drivers in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series tuned up for Sunday’s Brickyard 400 at the famed 2.5-mile speedway and kept cool the best they could.

The heat and humidity were so intemperate that before practice, Tony Stewart, a two-time winner of the race, pointed to the bottle of water next to him and said, “I’m not a water guy. To see me drinking water, you know I’m conscious of it.”

Juan Pablo Montoya, who has unfinished business with the Brickyard 400, topped the speed charts in both practices. His fastest lap in the first session was 176.876 mph, then he climbed to 179.756 mph in the second.

Qualifying to set the 43-car field is Saturday.

Montoya, who won the Indianapolis 500 before he moved to NASCAR, had the dominant car in last year’s Brickyard 400. But the Colombian was caught speeding on pit road toward the end the race, leaving him with an 11th-place finish.

“In my eyes I still don’t think that I did anything wrong,” Montoya said. His team, Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates, “knows that we had the fastest car and we had the pace to win the race.”

If Montoya wins this year in his No. 42 Chevrolet, it would give team co-owner Chip Ganassi a motor sports trifecta: Montoya’s teammate Jamie McMurray won this year’s Daytona 500, and Dario Franchitti of Ganassi’s Izod IndyCar Series team won the Indy 500.

Owing to the prestige of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the Brickyard 400 is considered by many the second-most-important race on NASCAR’s Cup schedule behind the Daytona 500. But the speedway’s rectangular shape and flat corners — the corner banking is a meager nine degrees — also makes it one of the series’ toughest tracks.

As a result, drivers said Friday that it’s no surprise that the sport’s best drivers have tended to win here since NASCAR began racing at Indy in 1994.

Four-time Cup champion Jeff Gordon also has won the race four times. His teammate Johnson, who has won the last four Cup championships, has won three of the last four Brickyard 400s, including the last two. Two-time race winner Stewart also is a two-time Cup champion.

“The cream rises to the top for this event. There’s no slouches that win at the Brickyard,” Stewart said.

Indy also is basically a one-groove track, with drivers often racing single file and having to make precise moves to pass, as opposed to the two- and three-wide racing featured at many other NASCAR races on higher-banked tracks.

That means drivers also have to be patient.

“Any time I get out there and we get single-filed out there and we get into a run, it’s so hard to pass,” said Kyle Busch, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver. “It’s very frustrating for me.”

james.peltz@latimes.com