By David Caraviello, NASCAR.COM
June 25, 2007
12:17 PM EDT

SONOMA, Calif. -- They dangled flags striped yellow, blue and red from the railing of the main grandstand, and cheered as Juan Montoya celebrated in Victory Lane. They chanted "Co-lom-bia! Co-lom-bia!" so loud and vigorously, it seemed like one little corner of Infineon Raceway had been transformed into a northern suburb of Bogota.

Welcome to the new NASCAR, a sport whose international profile took a large step forward Sunday when the former Formula One star broke through to record his first victory on the Nextel Cup circuit. And in the middle of the champagne-spraying mob was burly, bespectacled Donnie Wingo from little Spartanburg, S.C., a crew chief whose repeated message of patience kept Montoya on track to win.

"Save all the fuel you can," Wingo said over the radio, again and again in a continuing mantra that accompanied the lap times relayed to Montoya each time he crossed the start-finish line. Wingo urged his driver to take it easy, to be smooth in the corners, to coast downhill once he overtook Jamie McMurray for the lead. All the math said that they wouldn't make it, that they'd be one lap short. But somehow Montoya babied the No. 42 car around the hilly layout, and joined native Italian Mario Andretti and Canadian Earl Ross as the only foreign-born winners on NASCAR's top tour.

As he bore down on the final corner, Montoya unleashed a celebratory scream. Wingo, on his way to Victory Lane for the first time since he won with Geoffrey Bodine at this very same road course 14 long years ago, had a very different reaction.

"Can I throw up now?" he said over the radio, and with good reason. It had been a tense, stomach-wringing finish to a stressful week, one that began Friday when what Montoya thought was a good car qualified 32nd at a track where no one had ever come from further back than 13th to win.

"I was just shocked when [Wingo] told me the lap time after qualifying," Montoya said. "I thought he was joking. I looked at the stand and saw he was telling the truth and thought, 'Man, we sucked.'"

Even car owner Chip Ganassi, a winner in NASCAR's top series for the first time in five years, was worried. "I've got to tell you, Friday night I was looking at the ceiling a lot laying in bed, I can tell you that," he said.

But Wingo never felt they were that far off. They tweaked the balance, tried to keep the car from sliding around as much, and the next day needed only five laps to post one of the fastest laps in practice. But then there was still the little matter of that deep starting position, a deficit even a road-course ace like Montoya might not be able to make up on his own. "We knew he could get half of them," the crew chief said, referring to the 31 drivers ahead of them on the grid. "If we could get the other half, we'd be in pretty good shape."

They did just that, bursting into the top 10 by the halfway point. Wingo and Ganassi wanted Montoya to be patient, to be careful, to be smooth. And for the most part -- a punt of Kurt Busch notwithstanding -- he was, surprising those who remember an F1 driver brazen enough to move Michael Schumacher out of the way. "It's a little early to race these guys," he once told his crew, causing his car owner and crew chief to glance at one another in disbelief.

"I looked at Wingo, and Wingo looked at me, we were looking around thinking, 'I must have heard that from somebody else's radio,'" Ganassi said.

He would need that patience later on, as the fuel ran low and the race wore down and the question of whether Montoya could make it all the way hung in the bright blue wine country sky. Wingo implored him, urged him to take it easy whenever he could. "Everybody around here is in the same boat, trying to save fuel for the end," he told his driver over the radio.

They make for an interesting partnership, a combination of driver and crew chief that's all about contrast. Montoya is the cosmopolitan one, the F1 expatriate who still carries the vestiges of that circuit's dash and flair. Wingo hails from NASCAR's ancestral heartland, climbing the career ladder as a mechanic before breaking in as a crew chief with legendary Spartanburg-based car owner Bud Moore. The only Columbia he knew growing up was South Carolina's capital city.

But somehow, despite an ungainly clash of accents over the radio, they make it work. They certainly did Sunday, when Montoya followed Wingo's instructions to the letter, and coaxed enough mileage out of his black Dodge to add a NASCAR victory to his open-wheel triumphs in Indianapolis, Monte Carlo, Monza and elsewhere around the world.

"We were like a half a gallon short, the way we had it figured. That's basically about a lap," said Wingo, a winner on NASCAR's top series for the fifth time. "We were about a lap short. We kept hounding and hounding and hounding, save fuel, save fuel, save fuel. I think he saved a lot of fuel there, and really didn't lose any lap times by doing it. It all worked out good. He did a great job."

So great, in fact, that Montoya had enough fuel remaining to finish the cool-down lap and do a burnout. The light indicating an empty fuel cell didn't illuminate until he pulled into Victory Lane. By that time, the crisis had passed. All that was left for Wingo to do was smile for the cameras, and take a well-earned swig from a magnum of champagne.