Montoya looks for first Indy double

SPEEDWAY, Ind. Juan Pablo Montoya put his lips to a milk bottle seven years ago at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The track's famed yard of bricks is next on his kiss list.

Montoya, who celebrated his 2000 Indianapolis 500 win with the traditional swig of milk, can become the first driver to win both an open-wheel race and a stock-car event at the Brickyard in today's Allstate 400. Victors in the NASCAR Nextel Cup race mark their success by kissing the swath of bricks that mark the track's start-finish line.

Montoya, though, gives lip service to his chances.

"You cannot come into a place thinking you're going to win," Montoya said.

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Yet Montoya starts Sunday's race on the front row, next to polesitter and Ganassi Racing teammate Reed Sorenson. Ryan Newman starts third, Dale Earnhardt Jr. fourth and Kasey Kahne fifth. Kurt Busch, Jeff Burton, Greg Biffle, Casey Mears and Denny Hamlin round out the top-10 starters.

Montoya makes history just by starting the race. He is the first driver to compete in the track's three major events the Formula-1 Series' United State Grand Prix being the other and is the third Indy 500 winner to drive in the NASCAR race. A.J. Foyt and Danny Sullivan raced in the 1994 inaugural Brickyard 400, finishing 30th and 33rd respectively.

Unlike Foyt and Sullivan, Montoya goes into the Brickyard 400 with stock-car experience. He is Nextel Cup Series rookie this year after running a handful of Busch Series races and the season-ending Cup race at Homestead-Miami Speedway last fall.

He has six top-20 finishes in 19 races this season and posted his first Cup victory last month at Sonoma.

Yet for all his experience both in stock cars and at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway he still feels like a rookie. He said the 3,500-pound stock cars present a greater challenge than the smaller, lighter Indy and Formula-1 cars do at the flat, 2.5-mile oval.

"It is a little bit different with the Cup cars pretty hard," Montoya said. "The Formula-1 circuit is pretty straightforward. With the IRL cars, it was a really fast oval and pretty flat. I don't know. I've been asking people what they think and where they brake."

Montoya could be sand-bagging, like a scratch golfer claiming the course is playing difficult before a tournament. He won the Indy 500 in his debut at the track, one season after capturing the CART series season championship as a rookie.

Montoya's owner, Chip Ganassi, says the circumstances are different.

"At that time, we were very, very strong as a team," said Ganassi, who owned Montoya's Indy 500 winning car. "We'd just come off winning four championships. We had a great driver, but we also had a great backup staff of mechanics, engineers and management that really pulled this off."

Ganassi's NASCAR operation is still up-and-coming. This marks his seventh Cup season, and his drivers have posted six wins. But Montoya's Sonoma victory was Ganassi's first since 2002, and Montoya is the shop's points leader. He is 20th in the standings, 303 points out of 12th place and the cutoff for the season-ending Chase for the Nextel Cup.

David Stremme, 25th in points, and Reed Sorenson, 29th, also drive Ganassi cars.

"We're not even close to hitting the panic button or anything like that about where we're at in the points or what we've going to do," Ganassi said. "I don't think we can sit there and say how we can get in the Chase. We just have to do good week in and week out."

Montoya takes a similarly cautious approach, even at a track like the Brickyard where he's seen success. And he'll revel in his history-making start later in life.

"I think when I'm 50 that's going to be a remarkable thing to remember," said Montoya, who posted two top-10 finishes in six Formula-1 starts at the Brickyard, "but today it's about getting the job done."