Andretti sees more duels with Montoya

By Compiled from Times wires

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 28, 2000

CICERO, Ill. -- The spectacular race-ending duel between Juan Montoya and Michael Andretti on Sunday in the Michigan 500 may have been a preview of the final nine races of the CART season.

Both drivers have had their problems this season with mechanical ills and bad luck. But heading into Sunday's Target Grand Prix at Chicago Motor Speedway, Andretti is at the top of the points standings and Montoya is 30 points behind, in fifth.

"Juan is going to be the guy, I think," said Andretti, who lost to the defending series champion by less than a car length after 17 laps of wheel-to-wheel battling.

"He's the only other guy besides me who can really complain about the problems he's been having this year. We both gave away a lot of points early in the year. But if we hadn't, I think we'd probably still be pretty close."

Montoya, who won seven races last year on the way to the series championship as a rookie, got his second CART win of the year at Michigan. He also won rival Indy Racing's Indianapolis 500 in May.

But the 24-year-old Colombian has led a series-high 580 laps without much to show for it. By contrast, Helio Castroneves is second with 194 laps.

The Michigan victory was a big boost for Montoya and the rest of the Target/Chip Ganassi Racing team.

"The timing for that win was perfect," he said. "We had a few difficult races in a row, so that big win was great for our confidence."

Sunday likely wont' be a two-driver show, considering the series has had eight different winners this year. The only two-time winners are Montoya, Andretti and Gil de Ferran, who is one point ahead of Montoya in the standings and trails second-place Roberto Moreno by 19.

Practice begins on the one-mile Chicago oval today, and the first of a maximum 22 points available this week go to the pole winner Saturday. Points are awarded to the top 12 finishers in the race, with the winner getting 20 and the driver who leads the most laps one.

The championship race is so tight, with the top 10 drivers separated by 42 points, that few drivers consider themselves out of the race.

Jimmy Vasser, Montoya's teammate and last year's third-place finisher in Chicago, is ninth in the standings -- and hopeful.

"There are too many races left to get discouraged, and we're only 41 points off the lead," said Vasser, the 1996 series champ. "We have to score points in the remaining nine races in order to give us a shot at the title, and there's not one person on this team who thinks we can't do it."

Last August, about 70,000 people flocked to the Chicago Motor Speedway for the inaugural Target Grand Prix. That led to talk about the "resurrection" of motor sports in Chicago.

Next month, also at the Speedway, NASCAR's Craftsman Truck series will run on a one-year deal, the only kind of deal NASCAR gives. But discussions to bring it back in the future are under way. Next year, CART will return with the Grand Prix.

The Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet will host Busch and Winston Cup races in mid July and an Indy Racing event in September.

Indy Racing's Tony George and Bill France Jr., the godfather of NASCAR, are the forces behind the corporation building Chicagoland Speedway, which initially will seat 75,000. But it can be expanded to more than 100,000 if the response is there -- which it was after the Cup date was announced in May.

Through the first week after that announcement, speedway phone lines handled an average of 500 calls an hour, and its Web site had 1.5-million hits. It also quickly sold out its initial offering of 4,000 Founders P.A.S.S. seats, which went for $1,500, $750 and $500 and gave the purchaser the right to buy tickets for any event there.

"Chicago will be the biggest market (we'll) be racing in," George said.

Said interim CART chief and team owner Bobby Rahal: "I don't think that there's any doubt that metropolitan-based venues is where our strength is."

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.

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