The great ones, no matter the sport, can take the most-difficult activity and make it look easy. Where others sweat and strain and grind their teeth into fine dust, they effortlessly glide and always recall sweet cream flowing gently across a waxed floor.
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Juan Montoya, the 24-year-old Colombian, is a great one and Monday he proved that once again by encoring his Indianapolis 500 victory with another in the Miller Lite 225. He handled The Milwaukee Mile as effortlessly as he had the 2.5-mile Brickyard and simply crusied to his first CART triumph of the year in the sixth race of this CART season.
Michael Andretti, who closed with a rush, finished 1.015 seconds back in second ahead of Patrick Carpentier, who was another 7.442 seconds behind. But on an afternoon finally blessed with a rare glimpse of sunshine, no one ever truly threatened Montoya.
With the victory, he became just the ninth driver in history, and the first since Al Unser Jr. in 1994, to win Indy and Milwaukee back-to-back. Along the way he also handed Toyota its first CART victory. Toyota had jumped into the CART series five years ago and only last off-season did it sign up the powerful Target/Chip Ganassi Racing team that features Montoya and Jimmy Vasser.
This was a bold move by Ganassi, who had won the four previous CART championships with Honda engines. But here, in a race pushed back a day by rain, it finally delivered, and won in its 78th start.
“It’s a shame we didn’t have a win earlier. They worked so hard with us,” Montoya later said. “But we’ve been very unlucky. The last two races, things were definitely not going our way. We were leading laps, leading laps, leading laps, then something would come up.”
“They have everything going for them now,” said Andretti. “Juan’s doing a good job, but his team’s doing a great job too. They did dominate races before. Here they finally got some breaks going for them.”
Montoya, in fact, entered Monday’s affair having led 303 of the 766 laps run in this series’ previous five races. But after dominating in Japan, where he led 172 of 201 laps, a mistake by his crew during a late pit stop doomed him to seventh. And after challenging in Nazareth, where he led 110 of 225 laps, he ran up the back of Roberto Moreno on a restart and was forced to get a new nose cone on an unscheduled pit stop that dropped him to fourth.
But Monday, after starting from the pole, he encountered no mishaps and he made a shambles of a race that had opened with any number of story lines. There were questions about the new wing CART introduced this year on short ovals, a wing that makes passing difficult. There were questions about fuel mileage, which traditionally has an effect at The Mile. And, as always, there were questions about Toyota, which before this year never had finished better than fourth.
But Montoya, with his brilliant performance, made all those questions mute and drained this affair of any drama. He led its first 84 laps and lost that lead only when he pitted. He regained that lead on Lap 115 and lost it only when he again pitted 56 laps later. He took over the lead for a final time on Lap 187 and after Lap 208, he led Andretti by 5.493 seconds.
This is when Montoya began to get caught up in the traffic he was lapping and Andretti mounted his late charge. Slowly, lap after lap, he crept closer, but Montoya was cruising and there would be no catching him.
Andretti never truly challenged.This race, from start to finish, belonged to Juan Montoya and when he cruised through the finish line, he shook his fist in triumph.
“No. I’m not really surprised. It had to come sooner or later,” he said. “We were leading nearly 50 percent of the laps. It was just a matter of being patient and making everything right. Today we did that.”