NASCAR TOYOTAS Party South of the Border

A sunny Sunday afternoon of NASCAR racing in Mexico on the 2.5 Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez road course's undulating S-curves that more resemble Moulhannon Drive in Lost Angeles or the Outerdrive through River Rouge Park in Detroit, Michigan than the Super Speedway at Daytona Beach, Florida.
The road course outside Mexico City approximates what driving would be like on the roads through the big parks in your region if street racing were a legal, everyday happening.
The winner of the NASCAR Busch Series Motorola Mexico 200 was a "Rookie" driver. Rookie is a derisive term applied to a beginner at any sport, a person who has to earn the respect of the other players through sterling play and exibition of courage and resolve to win before they are accepted as equal copmpetitors.
But this Sunday afternoon the rookie was a Formula 1 champion who crossed over to the greater riches to be won in NASCAR-style racing.
Juan Pablo Montoya started from the 3rd position in front of 70,000 Mexicans new to NASCAR racing to win the 82 lap race. (The Daytona 500 is 202 laps, just for comparison.
Being a former Formula 1 driver certainly helped Montoya through the curvacious course. The veteran super speedway drivers used to a different style of racing, with having to use the brakes being the most obvious difference and having to set a line for the racecar to travel to make it around the next curve before exiting the last one is a very precise exercise at high speeds.
Juan Pablo Montoya was driving a Dodge to it's first victory this year.
Jason Leffler in the first TOYOTA to finishcame in sixth. David Reutmann and Dave Blaney completed the 82 laps also in 12th and 13th places.
The TOYOTA teams are finishing closer to the leaders and are becoming more consistant; keeping in mind that the drivers, crew chiefs, mechanics and pit crews have to get used to working with a new sponsoring manufacturer, TOYOTA Racing Develpment, they are making rapid progress.
(A TOYOTA innovation is that all the TOYOTA teams meet and share all information.) Of course, for Chevrolet to do that would require the rental of "the convention center" in every NASCAR race city.
A Juan Pablo Montoya update: He drove his Dodge to a fifth-place finish at the Atlanta Motor Speedway where Jimmie Johnson won and Tony Stewart was second.