IndyCar driver Juan Pablo Montoya says he was 'really tired of not winning'

Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

Estou desde semana passada para postar esta entrevista com Montoya e acabo me enrolando. Hoje finalmente consegui.

O colombiano sempre tem coisas interessantes a dizer (especialmente pelo jeito sincero que conta as coisas) e nesta entrevista Montoya falou sobre a falta que sente de vencer, o que o motiva a continuar, sobre sua temporada de retorno à Indy, a relação com o Team Penske, sobre Nascar, enfim, confiram.

IndyCar driver Juan Pablo Montoya says he was 'really tired of not winning'

Montoya talkes about his return season to IndyCar in Autoweek interview 

 Juan Pablo Montoya says the bar has been raised for his second year back in Indy cars after a successful 2014 run with Team Penske. This year, the 39-year-old former Formula One racer from Colombia finished fourth in the Verizon IndyCar Series championship, had a win at Pocono in July, and helped Chevrolet capture its third consecutive manufacturers' championship in the series. 

On Wednesday, Autoweek caught up with Montoya at the General Motors Tech Center in Warren, Mich., where he met with Chevy employees and promoted the May 29-31, 2015 Chevrolet Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix weekend -- the IndyCar Series’ only scheduled doubleheader next season. 

Here’s Montoya’s take on his return to open-wheel racing, his teammates, never looking back and what it was like being named IndyCar’s most popular driver for 2014: 

Autoweek: How would you grade your first year back in IndyCar? 
JPM: The first half sucked. It was frustrating. Our first oval was the Indy 500. As quick as we were, in hindsight I look back at it and I never had any front wing through the day, and I should have. I was really conservative about it, and I screwed up in the pits. It would have made the car better in traffic. In clean air, it was really nice to drive, but in traffic, I just had too much understeer. You look back on it, and you think it was a shame it was that way because I could have had a better shot at winning. I led laps and was looking really, really good. In the three 500-mile races, I finished fifth, fourth and first. 

Autoweek: When did you feel comfortable again in an Indy car? 
 JPM: I haven't yet. The first laps back in the car were really awkward because I’m pretty big [in the shoulders]. I don’t have a lot of seat. You forget how far back in the seat you are in an Indy car. Plus, my legs are really short. I have to sit with my ass all the way forward to reach the pedals. It’s kind of funny really. 
I had a really nice season. My race pace was really good. I feel my race pace was really good on road courses, and I think NASCAR helped me get really good on ovals. You look at every oval, and I’m running in the top five, no problem. I don’t even have to think about it. On street courses, I feel like the speed was there. I felt my biggest weakness was the red Firestone tires. You spend all weekend practicing and setting up the car on one tire, and then you've got to qualify on a different tire. I thought that was kind of hard. And being a new guy, I was at a little bit of a disadvantage. I didn’t do a good enough job driving the car with the red tires. We didn’t do a good enough job adjusting the car for the situation.

Autoweek: What was it like returning in an Indy car to some of the tracks you ran a year ago in NASCAR?

JPM: Those were some of the hardest races. Places I had been at in NASCAR before were actually harder because my mind was used to saying, ‘This is as far as you can go [into a turn]. If you go past this, you’re not going to make it.’ To break those barriers was really hard. I didn’t know what to expect, but I did my first short-track oval in Phoenix about a month after the Phoenix NASCAR race. When I was asked about what I normally do on that track, I say, ‘I brake here … I roll … I want to get back in the gas around the corner.’ At Phoenix, we started testing at nine [in the morning] and it took me until about 11 before I could run wide open in turns three and four and after lunch before I could run wide open in one and two. It was, ‘Oh my God!’ 

Autoweek: Was your win at Pocono an affirmation of your successful return to open-wheel racing? 

JPM: I don’t think I had any doubts that I could do it. I really didn’t, to be honest. It’s like in NASCAR, if you look at how many times we threw away wins, we just never closed the deal. It’s a matter of executing and getting it closed. One of the good things with being with Team Penske is they’re the best at it. They know how to close the deal. Being with the right team makes a big difference. That was the first thing I said when I left NASCAR -- whatever I do, I want to make sure I’m in a winning car. I’m really, really tired of not winning.

Autoweek: You’ve run with a lot of teams in a lot of series. Do you ever feel you stayed too long or left a ride too early? 

 JPM: There’s always ifs and buts, but ifs and buts don’t count. You could say, I could have stayed longer in Formula One and maybe won a world championship. I left Formula One because I just wasn’t enjoying racing. To be good, the passion has got to be there. If the passion is not there, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. 

Autoweek: Why do championship-caliber open-wheel drivers struggle so much to be successful in NASCAR? 

JPM: I don’t think they struggle as much as people think. How many times has Ganassi made the Chase? They made the Chase once, and the only time they made it was with me. This year, they had really good cars, and they still didn’t make it. I knew it was going to take a couple years to be really good at it, and we became really good at it. We fought for the championship. We had a genuine chance to win the championship in ’09. The 2010 season was a pretty good year, too. Then we started flipping people. When you change people you’ve got to make sure you’ve got a really good structure underneath. It’s that way in any company. Every situation is different. One of the things I love about Team Penske is that you’re really part of something. They make you feel like you’re really part of something. [My teammate] Will [Power] beat us for the championship, and I was really happy we won it. Any other year, in any other series with any other team, I would have felt like I got my ass kicked. And here, I felt like I was part of something. We are one -- all three cars this year and four cars next year -- are part of something. We all work together to achieve what we want, and that’s winning. 

Autoweek: So you’ve found something special on the IndyCar side with Team Penske? 

JPM: Oh my God. It was actually awkward at the beginning. We all are completely open books. We don’t hide anything from each other. We play the game of, ‘this works better, try this.’ If I see Will [Power] is better than me in a corner, I’ll ask him what is he doing different from me. For me, and it sucked, I was quickest of the three cars at Milwaukee by a mile, and Will put my setup on his car and I got my ass kicked. At the end of the day, we were proud of that. Yeah, it sucks when we finished 1-2.

Autoweek: Are you starting to feel like one of the older guys out there? 

 JPM: I’m 39, but I’m probably the most immature of the four drivers on our team. Will [Power], he’s different. Let’s just call him different. He’s a great guy. I really enjoy my teammates. Simon [Pagenaud] and Helio [Castroneves] came to Colombia for my celebrity race. We had a blast. It was nice to see Simon outside of racing. It was nice for Helio and myself to bond with him outside of racing. 

Autoweek: After winning a race and finishing fourth in the championship in your first year back, are the goals higher for 2015? 

JPM: They friggin’ better be. I made too many mistakes. The hard thing is the qualifying. I need to figure out how to qualify better. You can recover a lot of times, but you can put yourself in bad situations way too often. 

Autoweek: How has IndyCar changed during the years you were in NASCAR? 

JPM: It’s funny because when you’re outside any series, people will bad-mouth other series. People will bad-mouth NASCAR, they’ll bad-mouth Formula One, IndyCar. But I was very amazed how good the crowds are in IndyCar. People do criticize IndyCar for that. The ovals need a little bit of work to attract more people. I enjoyed the Indy 500 more than any other race in a really long time. There’s not a race that comes close here in America to that. For me, Monaco [in F1] was really special because I grew up watching [Ayrton] Senna. But, as an event, Indy has the wow factor. It’s cool because with the road course race now at Indy, you’re there for a month. All the build-up, the testing, the work, the amount of hours with the engineers looking at everything and talking about everything, and you get to race there and you still think, ‘Man, we didn’t get to do everything that we wanted to do.’ Wish I had another week. You want to be better than anybody else at this level, you just have to work harder than them. 

Autoweek: How satisfying was it to be named IndyCar’s Most Popular Driver for 2014? 

JPM: I think people like who I am. People want to see the true personality of drivers. I think IndyCar has that. I think I have that. I don’t try to make a name for myself by knocking somebody off or passing somebody just because I want to beat them or be better than them. I want to kick their ass every single week. There’s no secret. People see that fire in me, and that’s what people like.

See more at: http://autoweek.com/article/indycar/team-penkses-juan-pablo-montoya-says-he-was-really-tired-not-winning#sthash.zJPwFVIm.dpuf 

Beijinhos, Ludy