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Nascar's global ambitions got a boost with the arrival of Juan Pablo Montoya. But the league's hottest rookie ever has more modest goals: he just wants to win

He is taking it slow, playing it safe. Juan Pablo Montoya plods around NASCAR's playoff venue at a toddler's pace. He eyes his 2-year-old son, Sebastian, making sure the beautiful, brown-eyed boy doesn't drift too high up the steep banks of Homestead-Miami Speedway. At the same time, Montoya signs autographs for fans who have shown up at a charity walk on the eve of the Ford 400, the final Nextel Cup race of 2006. Mainly Anglo, mostly Southern, they politely stalk this Colombian from the glam world of Formula One, a man who in July decided to join their world and make his home among the Waffle Houses.

"You're the one to watch for next year," says a bleach-blond woman in a Bobby Labonte 43 car Cheerios hat and checkered-flag shorts. Montoya signs his superstar signature and smiles his rock star smile and speaks his clear, pleasantly accented English. Another fan asks if it's fun flying up that bank in those boxy cars. "Somewhere between fun and really bad," Montoya answers. "You get on the marbles, and whoa, you don't want to hit that wall."

The day before, just five months removed from F1, the 31-year-old Montoya capped a remarkable autumn by qualifying for his first Cup start; on this cool November morning, he is relaxed for the first time in months. He speaks of the importance of tact, of making no enemies among his new, monolingual, unicultural rivals. "My reputation is aggressive this and aggressive that," he says. "But if I'm aggressive now, what good does it really do?"

All fall, on tracks across the U.S., he has gathered experience while bottling up his legendary competitiveness. Could he have shown such restraint 10 years ago? "Oh no," he says. "It used to be do-ordie every lap. Now, when it's time to get down to business, I get down to business. But if there's 200 laps to go, that's not down to business." Besides, he says, "I've felt really welcomed here by everybody."

A day later, Montoya will trade bumps with veteran Ryan Newman, slide up the bank, crash trunk-first into the wall and unceremoniously jump from his first Nextel ride as it's consumed in a ball of fire. NASCAR's welcome is a warm one.

WHEN CARS race three-wide at nearly 200 miles an hour, giveand-take is part of the deal. If your ride isn't running well, you let the faster guy take the faster line. The tacit agreement is that a few weeks or months down the road, when your car is the fast one, the other guy will let you by. But winners are habitual takers, and Juan Pablo Montoya is a winner. He won at Monaco, Monza and Indianapolis. His ability is vast, his patience limited. Mindful of that, team owner Chip Ganassi has given him guidelines: "It's a long season. Don't get into petty squabbles." (That's guideline No. 2, right after "Don't lean on these cars" and just before "Don't take yourself too seriously.") There's another edict at Chip Ganassi Racing: Win. Ganassi and co-owner Felix Sabates have fared well in American open-wheel racing, but they've never broken through the Hendrick-Roush axis in five years in NASCAR. "People don't know if I'm serious about stock cars," Ganassi says. "This validates what we do. When a guy like Montoya says, 'Hey, I'm your driver,' that says something about us."

The chance to win is a major reason Montoya left F1, where the work pays better but where his McLaren team had no chance of beating Ferrari and Renault for the championship. "What I wanted to achieve, I did, except win the championship," he says. "And that wasn't going to happen."

America, he thinks, will be different. He has won here—a CART championship in 1999 as a rookie driving for Ganassi and the Indy 500 a year later. His guys in the garage believe. After Montoya finished 11th in his Busch debut at Memphis in October, crew chief Brad Parrott could not contain himself: "He learns every race. We'll probably see him win a Nextel Cup within three years."

When, or if, Montoya slingshots off the learning curve and into Victory Lane is only part of what makes his arrival so fascinating. Just by showing up, he's rattling a sport where progress is measured by going in circles. He has already changed the makeup of the crowds. In Memphis, Consuelo and Nancy Acevedo attended their first NASCAR event bedecked in blue-and-gold Colombian-flag sweaters. "We want to see Juan Pablo," they explained in halting English. How many friends came with them? " Mucho ," Consuelo said. "Fifteen."

At Homestead, Diamonds Douglas' first days on the job as a vendor were supposed to be easy. "They put me on the booth and told me it would be very slow," she says. But they gave her Montoya merchandise. "We had to restock two and three times each day. All the 42 hats sold out two days in a row, all his jerseys. People bought key chains, like, 10 at a time." Demand ran so high, Douglas' bosses took apart the booth to sell the display items. She estimates that 75% of the customers were Latino.

Six months ago, only 5% of visitors to the Ganassi team website were from outside the U.S. After Montoya won the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in late January, that figure jumped to 40%, and the Spanish-language hits are nearly equal to the English hits. That's music to the ears of NASCAR marketers eager to expand the sport from its cottony-white, all-American confines. They're in the middle of a three-year "initiative" in the Latino market, advertising races on Spanish-language radio and televising them on ESPN Deportes. With Montoya, they get a twofer: a proven Spanish speaking driver with a global following, one by no means limited to Latinos. His reps were pleasantly surprised by the interest from the oil patch—the Siberian oil patch. Seems Montoya's feud with the Schumacher brothers in F1 endeared him to Russian fans who hold tight to anti-Teutonic sentiments from World War II.

Although NASCAR is new to globalism, league executives know not to assume that every Mexican-American immigrant in California or every thirdgeneration Cuban in Miami or every working-class Dominican in New York will automatically root for just any Juan. The corporate offices are still at work on a master plan to mesh Montoya with NASCAR's existing diversity and marketing programs. If they're fearful of blowing this opportunity, it's only because they've never had anything like it.

None of this matters to Montoya's bosses. "We're not in the business of taking NASCAR global," Sabates says. "We're in the business of racing." Adds Ganassi: "Juan's here because of his ability."

That's why, with certain exceptions— Hellooo, Newman —the boys from the infield welcome this foreigner as a liberator. Maybe it's the corporate sponsorships that have tied tongues, or maybe it's money that has turned drivers bland, but the fiery, funny, to-hell-with-it-let's-race attitude of guys like Dale Earnhardt, Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip is vanishing. So it's no surprise that Montoya is constantly referred to as a throwback. He definitely plays a different game. He's been known to come into the garage and ask crew members, "How you doing, my bitches?" And he has given fond nicknames to many. When asked for a sampling, Mark Rette, Montoya's crew chief on the 42 Busch Series Dodge, balks. "There aren't any you could print." Is there a PG-13 one? "I'll think about it and get back to you." He never does.

Montoya is his own man and says what's on his mind. In a postrace interview in Memphis, he recalled a mix-up with a fellow driver coming out of a caution: "The guy gave me the finger. I'm like,
Come on, are we in kindergarten or what?" He eschews NASCAR conventions. Instead of showing every inch of sponsor ads at all times, he strolls the garage with his jumpsuit unzipped to his waist and hanging off his hips. And he drives with ferocity. As an F1 rookie in 2001, he made a daring pass of Michael Schumacher—akin to stripping Michael Jordan in an NBA Finals.

"We don't want our guys to be vanilla," says NASCAR communications VP Jim Hunter. "We want all the flavors. We love Juan's enthusiasm and candor. It's good for us that he's here. He's gonna be fun to watch."

Still …why is he here, exactly?

"I love the American way of life," Montoya says. "Everything's easy. It's three hours from Miami to Bogotá. You have stores like Target, with everything you need in one place. There's nothing like that in Europe. The way my life is, I'd rather live here." He pauses. "I'd rather have a hot dog than caviar." (Of course, this being Montoya, his dog is a different breed, one garnished with crushed-up pineapple and potato chips.)

Wouldn't the truly American thing be to stay in F1 and make more money? Montoya reportedly earned $14 million a year in salary alone with McLaren. But he is a restless soul who has never courted authority. The same year he won the Indy 500, he dissed the Speedway, saying the road course there didn't require the same attention as Formula One tracks. In F1, he not only took on Michael Schumacher, he rammed Ralf Schumacher while he was his Williams teammate. Though Montoya enjoyed some spectacular wins—seven in all—and posted the fastest F1 lap ever, he underachieved after his first two years on the circuit. He was seen as a swashbuckling, 1980s-style driver, à la his idol, the late F1 legend Ayrton Senna of Brazil. That rep doesn't fly in the modern era of keeping the car on the course and letting the best technicians win.

Montoya grew tired of F1's control-freak engineers, the endless test laps, the dearth of actual racing, the predictable results. He played Age of Empires for hours and even took up golf, becoming a 10 handicap. And just as rumors heated up that McLaren was unhappy with him, Montoya noticed that Casey Mears, Ganassi's driver in the Nextel series, was jumping ship. Ganassi was on a runway in California when he heard a familiar voice on his cell phone.

"You looking for another driver?"

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you call me?"

"You know which car I'm talking about?" Ganassi asked, thinking Montoya wanted an open-wheel seat.

"The No. 42 NASCAR. I'll drive that f—ing thing." With his plane taxiing, Ganassi told Montoya to call him back the next morning.

When Montoya did, Ganassi asked him, "You come out of your drunken stupor?"

"Yeah. I'm driving the 42."

Ganassi called Sabates and said, "You're not gonna believe this …"

MONTOYA REMEMBERS his first race like he's still that little 6-year-old in a go-kart. He was running at the front of the pack in Bogotá. Then his best friend nosed him out at the finish line, and little Juan Pablo cried. He couldn't stand losing. So he rarely lost—not even to his father, Pablo, a world champion who had beaten the great Senna in the fast mini machines. Pablo remembers another race: "Juan Pablo was 13, 14, and I won the pole; he was No. 2. As we raced, I had this feeling." A feeling of not being able to hold off his son. Juan Pablo would push and Pablo would counter, but the boy would push more. "You know if you push the car you'll wreck," Pablo recalls. "But if you don't push, he'll pass you and you'll never catch him. I was thinking, This is just like racing Senna." Juan Pablo won, and Pablo never competed again. He went to work helping his son win in karts, in GTIs, in Formula 3000 cars, in CART. The younger Montoya won in Colombia, Mexico, the U.S. and Europe. And when he fulfilled his boyhood dream of racing in F1, he won there, too, twice finishing third in the overall standings.

Yet for all of Montoya's speed, for all of his fire (a YouTubed run-in with a TV cameraman who accidentally banged him in the head is a classic), the man is remarkably grounded. His wife, Connie, is with him constantly, the couple's two kids in tow. She helps run the Formula Smiles Foundation he started when he became a U.N. goodwill ambassador, funding hundreds of sports programs in his homeland. A childhood pal, known to everyone as Gonzo, straps Montoya in before every ride. "Chip told me a long time ago that you don't race to make friends," Montoya says. "That will be different here, I think. In NASCAR you spend so much time with each other, the season's so long, you get to know the other drivers."

Montoya's idea of a vacation is loading up a dozen buddies, along with several cases of paintballs, and spending a week in mock wars outside his home in Colombia. To prove his dedication, he drops his fire suit to show off the bruises on his thighs. "My wife plays too," he says. "She's really good."

A bit of a hotdog? Certainly. A hot-dog guy? That too. It's why Montoya fits in so well with his new team and why they were all willing to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, last fall to prepare him for Cup and Busch races. "We crammed a year into three months to get him as much seat time as we could," Rette says. "But there hasn't been a test or a race where Juan hasn't said thank you to every guy. After the first test, we all said that once he figures it out, he's going to be incredible."

Take Parrott. The third-generation NASCAR man guided Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle to their first Busch Series victories within their first couple of months. Parrott was the calm voice in Montoya's helmet during practice last fall. He also has been the chief translator through the language barrier—make that the jargon barrier. Montoya is used to wine-andcheese F1 terms like "oversteer," and during practice laps, he'd refer to how much "inertia" he was bringing into the corners. His stock car compadres sling out slang like "loose" and "tight," "wedge" and "bite."

It helps that Juan's a quick study. Before a race, Parrott lists what he needs to know about the track, from Pit Road speed to hidden bumps to local lore (like the legend that Talladega sits on an Indian burial ground). Montoya devours it all and spits it back the next day. But Parrott still frets about communication. He wishes Montoya would be in the Ganassi garage in Concord, N.C., for Monday postmortems instead of listening in from Miami. "Honestly, the biggest obstacle will be his being away," Parrott says. "Jimmie Johnson and Tony Stewart live in North Carolina, and they're in the race shop every week." NASCAR drivers admire Montoya's progress, but they warn that he still has a lot to learn, from how to use a rearview mirror to listening to a spotter to stopping correctly in the pits. "He's fast," says Jeff Gordon. "He's got what it takes. But he's going to go through some tough times."

Already there have been petty squabbles, with J.J. Yeley in the Busch Series and the tussle with Newman that ended in a fiery wreck. Montoya swears those are in the past and that he's looking ahead. He figures he had only three to five years, tops, of racing left in F1. In NASCAR, if he plays it right, he can compete for another decade. His jump across the ocean is typically aggressive, but it isn't reckless. It's Montoya being Montoya, doing exactly what he wants to do. "I'm just going to be myself," he says, "and drive the car as fast as I can."

It's time to get down to business.

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