CONCORD, N.C. -- In what's become a rough Chase for anyone not named "Johnson," Juan Montoya's title hopes all but vaporized Saturday night at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

In a matter of seconds on the fourth of 10 restarts in the NASCAR Banking 500, Montoya's car suffered enough damage when it was pinched between the cars of Clint Bowyer and Mark Martin, to relegate it to a 35th-place finish.

“

We had one of our fastest cars. Not much we can do. It's one of those racing things that will happen and we've just got to move on.

”

-- JUAN MONTOYA

"When you look at the impact of aero -- and you hate to use an over-used term, but these cars are extremely aero-dependent," Earnhardt Ganassi Racing director of competition Steve Hmiel said. "Once you knock a part of it off, like we did, you're not going to run like you need to run the rest of the night."

Hmiel had had about 30 hours to digest what had happened, so he was able to inject some humor into what had been a gruesome event as it played out Saturday night, when a near-desperate Montoya and crew chief Brian Pattie had exchanged their need for a caution to be able to fix their car's damage.

"We're pushing real hard to have a TV time-out whenever one is necessary -- just stop all the cars and let us fix ours," Hmiel said through a laugh. "But what actually happens is the cars are all incredibly competitive and they all run basically the same speed during the race, or within tenths of a second, and if you tear your body up, without a bunch of cautions that are perfectly timed for you to come in and make proper repairs -- and it's very difficult to make proper repairs because so many parts of the car are tied to other parts of the car -- you're never gonna end up with the same car you had [and you end up laps down]."

That was exactly what happened to Montoya, who battled his car for nearly 40 laps, losing one lap in the process, before he spun coming off Turn 4 just before halfway. The team applied a patch to the right rear quarter panel, which lasted only a little more than 20 laps before the airflow ripped it off.

But through the whole debacle, the obvious positive was that Pattie kept a close rein both on his driver and his crew -- kept them focused and fighting to salvage anything they could. (Continued)