Memories are made of this. Just over a year ago, Juan Pablo Montoya diverted his attention from a difficult final season in US CART racing for a side trip to Indianapolis. The sideshow? A little race called the Indianapolis 500. The result? Victory. For Montoya, nothing else matters.
A year on, and Montoya is back at Indianapolis. The series may have changed, but the motive remains the same.
Montoya arrived at the crucible of American motorsport yesterday chasing back-to-back wins at Indianapolis and a second consecutive grand prix victory at this Sunday's US Grand Prix, having scored his first with comparative ease at Monza two weeks ago. And he was adamant that completion of that memorable double is more than possible.
"I think the question mark on Friday (in free practice) is how the tyres will compare. That will be the decider. If the Michelin tyres are really good then we're going to be really competitive and we'll definitely have a chance to win."
The likelihood is that Montoya will be rewarded in that comparison.
Indianapolis's mix of the long, straight-line blast along the mile-long pit straight and the warm weather expected over this weekend should play into the hands of Montoya's Williams team and tyre supplier Michelin.
"If, for example, we have a repeat of what happened at Silverstone (cold and damp conditions), then we haven't got a chance," said the Colombian. "But the tyres have evolved. At Spa it was cold and the tyres worked well, so we'll see how it plays."
Coupled with Montoya's title-winning experience around the ovals of the CART championship two years ago, the arguments against the Colombian being one of the weekend's pace setters begin to fade.
"I haven't driven an oval in a while, nearly a year," said Montoya of racing this weekend on Indy's legendary banked corners. "I think it's going to be quite interesting actually, getting the balance.
"When we're in the banking we're just starting to build up the speed. You know you're going 250-300 kilometres per hour, so it's still quick. But the car could take a lot more. From what I heard, turn one (which becomes the banked final turn on the F1 track) is not that difficult."
Montoya, the 1999 CART champion and perhaps the most familiar F1 face to US race fans, will have his fair share of supporters on Sunday, but the bulk of spectators will be sporting the rosso corsa of Ferrari, with the name Schumacher emblazoned across flags and T-shirts. Montoya, though, is famously unfazed by the world champion's reputation.
The presence of former Indy 500 champions Montoya and Jacques Villeneuve (who won at Indianapolis in 1995) should have brought even greater crowds to Indianapolis than the 200,000 who turned up to make the 2000 race the best attended F1 race of the modern era, but the recent events in the US are likely to keep many away from a weekend over which the shadows of September 11th still hang.
