Juan Pablo Montoya, team need to rally past setback

When you face the kind of heartbreak that Juan Pablo Montoya and his Earnhardt Ganassi Racing team faced Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, I truly believe the entire team has to pull together and put it behind them.

You simply can’t expect crew chief Brian Pattie or driver Juan Pablo Montoya to do it alone. It has to go all the way to the top and then all the way to the bottom. From the owners clear down to the guy that sweeps the floors, they all have to rally around the No. 42 team.

Sure, for the first few days after the Brickyard 400 it’s going to be extremely hard to find the silver lining in all this. To me, however, the silver lining is how well that team ran. A lot of teams simply can’t say that.

Look at Red Bull Racing, for example. They are having a terrible year across the board. As if the performance wasn’t bad enough for them, they have a driver that doesn’t even know if he will be able to ever come back and race. Those are the kind of things that are hard to overcome.

Having a great race car that dominates the race but doesn’t win it is still huge to overcome, but at least the team knows it is capable of winning. Team members know they have great drivers, good cars, great motors and everything they need to succeed. The No. 42 bunch will shake off what happened at Indy and move on to try to win this weekend in Pocono Raceway.

Sure, Sunday’s outcome is magnified for the No. 42 bunch because it is the second year in a row, in the second biggest race of the year, where they had a dominant race car and it was their race to lose. Unfortunately in both cases, they did lose for two completely separate reasons. Last year it was a speeding penalty and this year it was not making the right call on how many tires to take on that late pit stop.

Notice I said not making the right call. I cannot sit here and tell you it was the wrong call. There are always calls in our sport that simply don’t work out like a crew chief had planned. Sunday was an example of that.

Folks, I would have thought four tires would have been the way to go, too. I totally felt with that many laps on their tires and that many laps to go, it was the right call. That’s why I felt like four tires was the way to go. Unfortunately it didn’t end up that way.

Juan Pablo Montoya cannot get down on Brian Pattie and that team about the call Sunday. One year ago, Brian and that team didn’t get down on Juan Pablo when he got caught by NASCAR speeding on pit road. They will put this behind them. They simply have to.

For some teams, the more often it happens, the harder it becomes to get over. So that’s one of the additional burdens the No. 42 team has to overcome. Again, for the second consecutive year, they have fallen just short of winning NASCAR’s second biggest race of the year.

Richard Childress Racing has to be thrilled with the performance of all three of its teams. All three ran up front. They all finished in the top 10 — plus at one point it looked like Kevin Harvick was going to win that race. For the Earnhardt Ganassi camp, one of their cars won the race and the other, as we have documented so far, should have.

The common denominator in the Childress and Earnhardt Ganassi camps is the Earnhardt Childress engine package. It’s one of the biggest things those teams have going for them right now. Notice that all five of those teams’ cars qualified in the top 10. Additionally all five of them were at the top of the heap all weekend long. When it comes to Indianapolis, we always talk about the importance of horsepower and so it certainly paid off for those guys.

To me, the “Turnaround of the Race” award has to go to Joe Gibbs Racing. Joey Logano’s team had big engine issues all weekend. It didn’t get much track time. Logano qualified terrible and then had to start at the rear of the field. By lap 15, JGR had Kyle Busch, who had spun out with a little bit of damage and Logano‘s car had front-end damage from that same wreck. On top of all that, Denny Hamlin was already a lap down and his car was running hot.

You just know that team owner Joe Gibbs and President J.D. Gibbs had to be looking at each other saying, “What in the heck is going on?” All three teams refused to give up, though, and by the end of the day you had the Busch and Logano finishing in the top 10. Hamlin got his lap back and fought his way into the top 15. To me, that is definitely where the “Turnaround of the Race” award should go — Joe Gibbs Racing.

I know one of the continuing storylines people are following is the Sprint Cup winless streak of Roush Fenway Racing and the Ford brand. However, look how well Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle ran a couple weeks ago. Look how well they and the other Fords ran this past weekend at Indy. When you do that, I don’t think it will be long before all of us will be able to say the winless streak is finally over for those Fords. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see it happen this weekend at Pocono.

I just think they have hit on some things with the new FR9 engine, chassis, suspension and geometry that is absolutely paying off for those guys across the board.