Juan Pablo Montoya, Come on Down

This weekend the NASCAR International Series aka The Busch (for a while longer) Series takes the caravan south of the border to the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez at Mexico City.  If the NASCAR stars are aligned as we have come to expect, this will be Juan Pablo Montoya's moment to shine.  Crowds for the first two races in Mexico have been disappointingly sparse after early predictions of upwards of half a million spectators for the inaugural event in 2005.  There were local Latin drivers in the first two events and I expect that there will be qualifiers this weekend who are not Busch Series regulars.  Still the best chance for a Latin born representative of the NASCAR Diversity program to win this race will come from the trio of Montoya, Adrian Fernandez and Michel Jourdain Jr.  All three are hugely popular in Latin America.  That should solve the crowd problem.  My money is on Montoya.  And the NASCAR stars, too.

Comments

[Steve]

This race ended up being one of the most entertaining NASCAR road races in years. Not only did one of the hispanic drivers win, the most popular hispanic driver won by punting his teammate out of the way. Scott Pruett was not happy. Chip Gannassi was not happy. Now--JPM can piss off Scott all he wants, but pissing off Chip was not a good move. How ironic that only seconds after ESPN got done interviewing CG about "team orders" only being not to wreck one another, JPM wrecks Pruett.

Congrats have to go to Denny Hamlin for a great run for the second year in a row and to Boris Said for running the entire race without a shifter knob--and NO ONE should have to run without a knob.

Steve

[Charlie]

I started making notes while watching this race and they were about things like, the commercials featuring the Wallace family (delightful), the commercials featuring Marcos Ambrose, alternately referred to as"kangaroo meat" and the "Australian turtle" (funny stuff). Then I started really paying attention to the race on the track.

This was a fantastic auto race. I thought at one point that NASCAR might step in and maneuver a finish. I do not believe that happened. What did happen?

Montoya's crew suffured a mishap with a fuel filling problem and as a result, lost a huge lead.

Montoya restarted about twentieth...on a road course...with about twenty laps to go...no way.

Several cautions occured, all from spins or wrecks, allowing JPM to close the gap.

Incredibly, JPM gets to second, behind his teamate, Scott Pruet, with about ten laps to go.

I feel that they each took different lines into the same corner and they got together, spinning Pruet out of the lead.

A no fault end to one of the great drives of my lifetime.