5-STAR ATTRACTION

Four open-wheel aces are following Juan Pablo Montoya and jumping aboard NASCAR. It should be one hell of a ride.

Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

As a 31-year-old rookie, Montoya had more fun than anyone expected (including him).

To walk the ARCA garage at Talladega is to step into racing's past. Part-time wrench-turners, looking more like Captain Jack Sparrow's crew than Jack Roush's, sit on milk crates smoking Winstons and telling lies. It's about the last place you'd expect to find an international racing star, a guy who married a Hollywood starlet in a Scottish castle. And yet last October, that's exactly where Indy 500 champ Dario Franchitti found himself—questioning where in creation his latest career move had led him.

"I was nervous," Franchitti says. But then he saw a familiar figure standing by his Dodge. "Juan was there at 9 a.m., with a big smile on his face, ready to help. He knew what I was thinking."

Yes, he's talking about Juan Pablo Montoya, NASCAR's accidental ambassador and reigning Rookie of the Year, the 32-year-old Colombian on whom NASCAR has heaped its hopes of building a bridge to the Spanish-speaking world. Turns out that bridge has two lanes and the second is filled with open-wheel superstars looking for a better life and three-wide racing in the New World. "It's too early to measure what Juan's impact will ultimately mean," says Jeff Gordon. "But one look at the entry list for the Daytona 500 tells you what kind of effect he's already had." At Daytona, Montoya will race alongside the best rookie class in NASCAR history, an all-star team of open-wheel defectors that includes an F1 world titlist, the past two IRL champs and three Indy 500 winners. "If anyone's looking for me, I'll be standing in line to get their autographs," says Regan Smith, driver of the No. 01 Dale Earnhardt Inc. Chevy and the lone ROY candidate of true stock car pedigree.

Smith might want to get Montoya's signature first. Because all of the following open-wheel stars say they wouldn't be aligned with NASCAR in 2008 if not for Montoya's momentous rookie season.

Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR

It's a tight fit, but Franchitti and Montoya have two Indy 500 wins and open-wheel titles between them.

DARIO FRANCHITTI, No. 40
Target Dodge, Chip Ganassi Racing

If everything had gone the way he originally envisioned, Franchitti—not Montoya—would have been the pied piper of the open-wheel world. Instead, his quiet backdoor talks with Ganassi were shelved by the sudden availability of Montoya in the summer of 2006. "There was only one driver in the world who I would've signed ahead of Dario," Ganassi says. "It just so happened that Juan's the one who called."

What looked like a setback for Franchitti proved to be a boost. He began the 2007 season as an also-ran at Andretti Green Racing, taking a backseat to his teammates: former champ Tony Kanaan and three others—Marco, Michael, Danica—who don't require last names. He'd been hurt in 2003 and 2006, and hadn't won a race since 2005.

Funny what the sport's two biggest trophies can do for a man. "I don't want to use the phrase 'back from the dead,' because I never felt that way," says the 34-year-old Franchitti, who won the IRL season title in addition to taking the checkered flag at Indy. "But I do know that the talk about me went from 'He's going to retire to a quiet life of sports car racing' to 'He's got all these NASCAR owners beating down his door.' "

Europeans have long viewed NASCAR's "taxi-cab racing" as a huge step down from Formula One and its feeder systems, and many fans had unrealistic expectations for Montoya when he jumped ship. "I think they all expected me to come over and kick everyone's ass," he says with a laugh. "Now they say to me, 'Wow, that looks like it's really hard.' I tell them it looks hard because it is! In the past when open-wheel racers came here, maybe they acted arrogant. Now they know better."

Although Montoya won twice last year—once in Cup, once in Busch—he also looked quite mortal at times. He struggled, he fought, but mostly he smiled. A lot. "I would talk to people back in Europe, and they'd say, 'You look really happy,' like it was a surprise," he says. "Why wouldn't I be happy? My family is with me all the time—we basically camp out together every weekend—and there is more passing in one lap at Daytona than in a whole season of Formula One."

So far, Franchitti has made six stock starts and wrecked four cars, his best run (17th) coming in that ARCA debut. This is where his new teammate comes in. "The first thing Juan explained was to be patient with bad days, because there are a lot of them," he says. "In open-wheel racing, if you finish worse than fifth, you've had a disastrous race. Here, you can run 20th and still feel good about it. I came here for a challenge. I just didn't realize what a challenge it would be."

Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR

Hornish owns just about every IndyCar record, but he hasn't quite figured out how to avoid the wall in stock cars.

SAM HORNISH JR., No. 77
Mobil 1 Dodge, Penske Racing

When IRL brass learned their defending champion was leaving for NASCAR, it hurt. When they heard three-time champ Hornish was bolting too, it felt like an amputation. "Sam has really been the embodiment of the kind of racer the IRL was hoping to build itself around," says Don Miller, the recently retired president of Penske Racing. "He's a young, American-born talent. But after setting all the records—wins, championships, money, everything—Sam needs another challenge."

Like Franchitti, the 28-year-old Hornish has found the transition to stock cars a little harder than anticipated. In 2006, his first two Busch Series starts ended in wrecks. Last fall, he failed to qualify in six Cup attempts before squeaking in at Phoenix and Homestead. This season, he doesn't have to worry about qualifying for the first five races, thanks to an unorthodox NASCAR-approved points switch with teammate Kurt Busch that places Hornish safely in the field. After that, it's up to him to get up to speed. "Dario came up to me last fall and said, 'Man, this is hard! Why didn't you tell me?' " says Hornish, the 2006 Indy 500 champ. "I told him, 'What difference would that have made? You wouldn't have believed it anyhow.' "

Hornish's former teammate, two-time Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves, says that the second-most-asked question of his Dancing With the Stars media tour was, "Are you going to NASCAR?" (Who knows, never say never.) The most-asked was, "Did you get it on with Julianne Hough?" (Never.) Likewise, Danica Patrick's biggest 2006 headlines came when her father was seen snooping around NASCAR garages at Chicagoland. And 2005 IRL champ Dan Wheldon has asked for permission to test a Cup car for boss Chip Ganassi. "No doubt that this is all a by-product of Juan's success," says Franchitti, who fully expects more of his former cohorts to switch in 2009. "Without him, we wouldn't be here."

John Harrelson/Getty Images for NASCAR

Carpentier lives in Las Vegas and considers himself as much American as Canadian.

Patrick Carpentier, No. 10

Valvoline Dodge, Gillett Evernham Motorsports
No rookie arrives with slimmer expectations or a wider grin than Carpentier, known as much for enjoying himself as for tackling turns. His five wins in 157 open-wheel starts led many to believe his potential was never fully realized. Some say he was a victim of the CART-IRL split, while others toss around "overrated." But after a season of retreat into sports cars, the 36-year-old French-Canadian has landed at revamped Gillett Evernham Motorsports. New team owner George Gillett, a world-renowned business maverick who also holds the deed of the Montreal Canadiens, has pledged to spread the stock car gospel throughout the Great White North and in return usher the wallets of that untapped market into NASCAR's coffers.

"There is one question that I get that never ceases to surprise me," says Carpentier, with just enough of an accent that the NASCAR PR staff needs to triple-check every transcript of his interviews. "I keep hearing about this invasion of foreigners and how the fans are going to think of us as villains. I've never been a villain in my life! I'm an American citizen. I live in Las Vegas. My kids are Americans. I was a speed skater when I was a kid, and I used to spend months in Lake Placid. But hey, playing the bad guy might be fun, right?"
There was nothing villainous about Carpentier's NASCAR debut in August, when he was second in the inaugural Busch (now Nationwide) event at Montreal's Gilles Villeneuve Circuit, the first outpost of the league's northern frontier. The NASCAR Canada office was opened in 2004, followed soon by the formation of the NASCAR Canadian Tire Series. Since then, the league has opened offices in Mexico and visited Europe, Japan and China.

Meanwhile, stock cars are beginning to pop up in the most peculiar places. Dale Earnhardt Jr. spent the holidays trying his hand at Australia's V8 Supercar series, and a group of F1 retirees has launched the Speedcar Series, which races Charlotte-built stock cars in Bahrain, Dubai, Indonesia and Malaysia. Plans for a late-model stock series were recently revealed in Holland. "You get the feeling everyone is trying to get in position for when NASCAR goes worldwide, or at least to try to beat them to the punch," Earnhardt says. "It kind of hurts your head to think about the possibilities."

Robert Laberge/Getty Images

Villeneuve will need to race hot out of the box if he hopes to find sponsorship and stick around.

JACQUES VILLENEUVE, No. 27
UNICEF Toyota, Bill Davis Racing

In attendance for that Busch event in Montreal was the son of the man for whom the track is named. Jacques Villeneuve, 36, had hoped to secure a deal to field a car in the race, but instead chose to focus on entering Cup. The result has been a bizarre series of events, from his initial attempt to buy Bill Davis Racing outright to his decision to make his Cup debut at (gulp) Talladega, which drew
criticism from, among others, Gordon. Now the enigmatic Villeneuve, who won the Indy 500 in 1995 and was F1 world champ two years later, is still sponsorless (UNICEF is on the hood for charity's sake) and staring into a NASCAR career that could last five years & or five races.

"We'll run the first five and see where we are," says Villeneuve, who closed Daytona testing by parting ways with longtime business manager Craig Pollock, thanks in no small part to how the deal with Davis was handled. "If we are still in our current financial situation as well as outside of the top 35 in points, then we will be in a position where we have to fight to make races. It's hard for me to get excited about that. Then again, I am being called a rookie again after a lifetime of racing. So that gives me a lot of excuses."

Montoya's move made the F1 crowd curious about NASCAR. Villeneuve's presence has made them obsessed. The cars with the carburetors suddenly demand respect. Autosport, the weekly bible of European racing, has moved taxi-cab racing to the front of the magazine, alongside its open-wheel coverage. Fans from Russia to Brazil are begging satellite providers to plug into Cup racing. Suddenly, Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso are having to answer a question that no one would have ever dared ask before.

How would you feel about moving to NASCAR?

Quietly, the postrace routine is changing even in the F1 paddock. The drivers and crews aren't jetting back home as quickly as they once did, opting to hang out in their RVs just a little longer to catch the start of the Cup race in the States. "We started watching to see how Juan was doing," says 14-year vet David Coulthard. "And we realized how entertaining it is. If I miss the races on TV, I watch them on tape. It's good to be familiar with their circuits and their personalities."

Sure it is, David. That's called research.

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