ARCA/Remax series veteran Frank Kimmel may have led the field to the chequers under caution at Talladega, but his success in the Food World 250 was beaten out of the spotlight by
Juan Pablo Montoya's stock car debut, which netted the
F1 refugee third place.
The ARCA/Remax series is a local competition considered among the early stages in a driver's NASCAR career, but Montoya was using the race as a brief introduction before embarking on a Nextel Cup campaign with Ganassi in 2007.
The Colombian started from the front row and led for nine laps in the #4 Texaco/Havoline Chip Ganassi entry, but also learned some hard lessons about NASCAR competition as he found himself caught up in a wreck and having to work his way from back to front.
"In
Formula One, if you go to the back, you stay in the back - you can be two seconds quicker than any other car and still cannot pass him," JPM said after his fightback, "It's great to see that, whatever happens... We were in the middle of the pack. They said, 'watch out, watch out, watch out.'. They came straight at me, and I was pretty lucky. The car went one way and the other and for some reason the car didn't spin. I was pretty pleased with that. I got hit and had to fix the car - I came to the pits four times to fix it and, even after that, you go out and you're in the back of a 30-car queue and you still can get up front. That's really, really nice."
Despite qualifying on the front row alongside another series veteran, Bobby Gerhardt, Montoya kept his nose clean until being caught up in somebody else's accident.
"Initially, I was a little bit careful, staying low just to get comfortable," he explained, "Then we fell back. I think the car behaved pretty good and, even after [the accident], the guys fixed it pretty good. I was in the back of the pack, running probably 15th or so, and Steven [Wallace] and I got together.
