Juan Pablo Montoya Says His Slow Start “Really Sucks”

And from what Montoya can tell, he’s definitely on the wrong side of the garage, which “really sucks,” he said Friday at Phoenix.

Montoya is 25th in points, which is a far cry from his breakout season last year, in which his No. 42 Earnhardt Ganassi Racing team made the Chase.

He isn’t running poorly, he said, but has instead been the victim of some unfortunate circumstances.

And that sucks. So much so, that he used the word “sucks” seven times during his interview with reporters on Friday, including four times in one answer.

“It sucks because we should be top five in points if we would have finished every race,” he said. “We are, I don’t know, 20-something, I don’t even know where we are in points to be honest. I don’t even look. Whether I look or not doesn’t matter, it sucks. The bright side is it sucks not because we are slow; it sucks because we have had a lot of issues.”

Montoya’s last five races have killed any momentum he had coming off his successful 2009 season. He’s finished 37th, 37th, third, 26th and 36th.

But because the team has at least run well, Montoya believes his Chase hopes for this season are still alive.

“You take it race-by-race, score as many points as you can and see what happens,” he said. “It is completely out of our control. We haven’t really made a mistake ourselves to say, ‘This one is on us’ yet. I don’t feel we have.”

The problem is, there’s no more room for error. A mistake by the team or driver now, Montoya said, “would really set us even further back.”

And that would really suck.