Juan Pablo Montoya has never been one for polishing the edges of a story, and that trait was on full display in Melbourne when the conversation drifted, as it often does around him, from modern F1 to the day he wandered into Indianapolis and won the biggest oval race on the planet.
The line that stuck wasn’t some romantic recollection about braving the banking, or a reverent nod to tradition. It was far more Montoya: he didn’t want to do the Indy 500 in 2000. In fact, he says he was “forced” into it.
Speaking on the BBC’s *Chequered Flag* podcast, Montoya was introduced as a seven-time grand prix winner and a two-time Indy 500 champion — that second win coming in 2015 — and Damon Hill couldn’t hide his admiration for the achievement. “I am impressed by the Indy 500,” Hill said. “That’s very cool.”
Montoya’s reply came with a shrug you could practically hear through the microphone. “Yeah, Indy, honestly, the first one was really funny, because I really didn’t want to do it,” he said. “I was forced to do it.”
Not because he was intimidated by the place, either. Montoya wasn’t selling fear; he was selling inconvenience. In 2000, American open-wheel racing was still split down the middle: CART on one side, the Indy Racing League on the other, with the Indianapolis 500 sitting on the IRL island like a separate religion.
Montoya was the reigning CART champion with Chip Ganassi Racing, and in his telling the team’s focus ought to have been painfully obvious. “Remember, at that time, the championships were split,” he explained. “So I was defending the CART championship, and the car was breaking down every week, and then they said, ‘Oh, we’re going to run this.’ And I was like, ‘Why are we taking focus with that [Indy 500], to run that?’ And so it was kind of weird.”
It’s a revealing glimpse into the politics of that era — not just the fractured series, but the way Indy could still bend a programme around it even if you were supposedly committed elsewhere. For all the reverence the 500 demands, Montoya’s point is brutally practical: you don’t chase a title with one hand while you build an Indy effort with the other, not when reliability is already chewing you up.
Yet once he was there, it took him roughly two laps to realise he was fine.
Montoya described heading out for what was meant to be gentle preparation before the required rookie test — the classic speed steps: 190mph, then 195mph, then 200mph. He’d just returned from Japan, was told to go out for a few warm-up laps, and did what he has always done when a steering wheel is placed in his hands.
“And so I went out, and by lap two, I was wide open,” he said. “I was doing 220 and I was second fast of the day. It was like, ‘Oh okay, you’re okay.’”
That sentence — “Oh okay, you’re okay” — is the whole Montoya Indy story in miniature. Not awe. Not nerves. Just a quick systems check, then straight into attack mode. It’s easy to forget now, with the mythology built up around that 2000 win, how violently he arrived on the scene at the Speedway: a rookie, a series outsider in a divided landscape, and immediately the quickest thing most people could see.
Hill, sitting opposite him in the same conversation, couldn’t resist adding a family footnote. His father Graham Hill — double world champion and one of the sport’s enduring characters — also won the Indy 500 as a rookie, back in 1966. And in typical Hill fashion, Damon’s memory of his dad’s Indianapolis legacy isn’t solely about trophies.
He recalled that A.J. Foyt had apparently told Graham Hill in a pre-race briefing: “Nobody wins Indy first time out.” Hill did exactly that anyway. But Damon said his father always maintained that the next best thing he achieved at the Speedway wasn’t even on track.
“My dad said… the next best thing he ever did was he got them to put doors on the toilets,” Damon said, before explaining that, until then, the men’s room had no doors on the stalls. “So he had a word with them, and apparently they then, after that, had doors on the toilets.”
It’s a wonderfully human detail in a sport that sometimes tries too hard to sound epic. One champion wins on debut and leaves with a trophy; another wins on debut and leaves a bathroom upgrade behind. Between Montoya’s blunt admission that he’d rather have been anywhere else and Hill’s story about toilet doors, you get a reminder that racing history isn’t just made of chequered flags and record books — it’s also shaped by grudges, distractions, and the odd practical improvement that sticks around long after the champagne dries.
And if there’s a subtle lesson in Montoya’s version of events, it’s that great drives don’t always start with great desire. Sometimes they start with someone telling you you’re doing it — and you deciding, two laps in, that you might as well do it properly.
