Hair-razing Daytona ride for Montoya
“I’ve hit a lot of things. But a jet dryer? I thought: ‘I’m actually hitting the jet and it’s not going to be fun.’ ”
I f Juan Pablo Montoya wasn’t stunned by the impact of the wreck, if he wasn’t surveying his burning stock car, or kneeling in the Daytona infield grass to survey the wounded jet-dryer vehicle he’d just crashed into at good speed, he’d have seized the occasion and done like Will Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby character in the 2006 comedy classic Talladega Nights:
Montoya would have stripped down to just his underwear and helmet and rolled round on the highbanked racetrack, consumed by invisible fire and, like Ricky Bobby, would have babbled: “Help me, Jesus! Help me, Jewish God! Help me, Allah! Aaaahhhh … help me, Tom Cruise, use your witchcraft on me to get the fire off of me! Somebody help, I’m (expletive) on fire!”
Of course, Montoya wasn’t on fire Monday night – though barely – in NASCAR’S most remarkable Daytona 500 ever run/stopped.
The crash is all over Youtube and, as it should, it will make the sports highlights forever.
It’s funny now, because nobody was injured. No, it’s hilarious.
One FOX TV replay showed Montoya’s Chevy sliding out of view and into the back end of the truck, the latter’s howling jet engine revving higher as if on a takeoff roll just as it’s struck. The flash of fire and cloud of smoke is from the car, the truck still a minute from igniting into a fireball.
Montreal race fans will remember Montoya from his Formula One days on Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, winning a pole and once finishing on the podium in six races from 2001-06.
They might recall him from his first Canadian Grand Prix, arriving here as a 25-year-old two-time CART champion and defending Indianapolis 500 winner, and how he spun himself out on his 19th lap, left to watch teammate Ralf Schumacher’s stirring victory in the Bmw-williams paddock.
On Friday of that 2001 race weekend, having played bumper-cars in practice, Montoya and Canada’s Jacques Villeneuve allegedly got into a shoving match, a scuffle Montoya flatly denied.
Asked the next day about his high-spirited rival, Villeneuve sniffed: “Montoya doesn’t exist,” which was true on Lap 19 of race day – and on Lap 34 for Villeneuve, who was dumped with a broken driveshaft.
Montoya left F1 in 2007 for a full-time drive in NASCAR’S elite Sprint Cup Series; sadly, he’s not been back to race in any of Montreal’s five Nationwide Series events.
Arriving at last weekend’s season-opening Daytona 500, driving the No. 42 Target Chevrolet for Earnhardt Ganassi Racing, Montoya had won twice in 181 Sprint Cup starts, earning 20 top-five finishes and nearly $28 million.
Sunday’s race was postponed by rain and Monday afternoon’s green flag was pushed back to 7 p.m. for fear of more bad weather.
So there was Montoya, minding his own business on the 160th of 200 scheduled laps, driving at moderate speed during a caution, down near the track apron as two jet-dryer vehicles cleaned the asphalt up near the wall of Turn 3.
And then something broke in Montoya’s Chevy, sending his car into a spin and into the back of one of the slow-moving modified pickup trucks that was filled with diesel fuel and whose helicopter-model jet engine was gorged with 750 litres of kerosene.
Boom.
FOX television returned from a commercial break to find Montoya’s car a flaming wreck in the infield and the driver limping away, before cameras panned up to the jet dryer to discover it stopped against the wall, jet fuel pouring from it.
A moment later, the truck also was on fire, its driver having escaped and run away. The truck driver, Duane Barnes, was taken to a hospital, examined and released, surely as a hero to NASCAR fans.
The race was red-flagged for two hours and five minutes, officials hauling away the vehicular remains and repairing the melted asphalt with a bonding substance, Tide laundry detergent, a firehose and garden-variety leaf blowers.
As all this was going on, popular driver Brad Keselowski had been live-tweeting with an iphone he had in his car, having earlier tweeted a photo from behind the wheel – while stopped – of a different flaming car in front of him.
The race finally sent into Tuesday morning, Matt Kenseth outlasted Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Greg Biffle to win a green-white-checkeredflag finish.
Keselowski’s night ended 13 laps from the end, caught up in a seven-car accident he couldn’t avoid.
“Nothing we could do there,” he tweeted. “Never saw the wreck till we were windshield deep.”
Montoya, meanwhile, was brilliant in conversation after being released from the track’s infield care centre.
“I’ve hit a lot of things,” he said. “But a jet dryer? … I thought: ‘I’m actually hitting the jet and it’s not going to be fun.’
“Before I got there, I was thinking this thing was going to be on fire pretty bad. And it was. I saw the flames. My helmet got a little burned.”
Montoya had been into the pits just before the wreck to have a vibration in his car checked.
“I got onto the back straight and I was in fourth gear, but I wasn’t really going that fast,” Montoya said of the moment before the accident. “Every time I got into the gas, I could feel the rear end (sliding) so I got on the brakes. While I was telling the spotter that the rear was moving, the car just turned right.
“It’s not the way you want to finish the Daytona 500. My foot hurts. I was on the brakes, and when I hit driver’s side, my foot slipped into the clutch and scratched it.”
Not the worst result, since Montoya could have been charbroiled. He had joked about his hot Bogota blood both times I spent with him in Montreal during his F1 days.
The first was at a downtown department-store promotion in 2004, racing Hot Wheels cars against a 5-year-old; he let the kid win the best-of-three event, but almost grudgingly, given his competitive juices.
And a year later, I heckled him for arriving late to a semi-private lifestyles talk arranged by his TAG Heuer timepiece sponsor.
“I hate people who are late,” he said, laughing at his own tardiness.
Late Monday night, it was a relief to see Montoya walk away from a terrifying crash that you had to see, and hear, to believe. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all in racing,” Keselowski joked during the repairs, tweeting on the track beside his parked car, “you see something new.”