Sprint Cup success has eluded Ganassi team

SONOMA, Calif. -- Moments after his driver Scott Dixon won the Indianapolis 500 last month, team owner Chip Ganassi took the winner’s traditional gulp of milk in Victory Lane before Dixon could hold the bottle.

“I was just so thirsty and happy at that point, I wasn’t really thinking about protocol,” Ganassi recalled.

If Ganassi skips the finer points now and then, he has earned it. His IndyCar Series team, Target Chip Ganassi Racing, is among the most successful in the sport and this season has won four of the series’ first seven races, including the Indy 500.

He has also been one of NASCAR’s more daring owners, bringing former Indy 500 winners Juan Pablo Montoya and Dario Franchitti to NASCAR’s premier Sprint Cup Series.

And today, Ganassi will watch Montoya defend his 2007 victory in the Toyota/Save Mart 350 on the 1.99-mile Infineon Raceway road course here.

That win was Montoya’s first in NASCAR, and it appeared to validate Ganassi’s bold stroke of bringing the Colombian to stock-car racing.

But Montoya hasn’t won since, only one reason why there hasn’t been much to cheer about at Ganassi’s Cup team, which he co-owns with Felix Sabates.

In fact, their Dodge team has been mediocre for several years -- Montoya’s win was the only Cup victory for Ganassi since 2002. It’s a perplexing shortfall in light of Ganassi’s sterling record in other motor sports.

Besides Ganassi’s Indy car success, his Grand-Am sports car team this year won the Rolex 24 at Daytona endurance race a third consecutive time and its drivers Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas lead that series’ point standings.

Ganassi also was dominant a decade ago, when his team won four consecutive titles in the now-defunct CART open-wheel series from 1996 to ’99. His drivers included Montoya, who also won the Indy 500 in 2000.

And after Ganassi moved to the IndyCar Series, Dixon won the series’ championship in 2003.

But in NASCAR this year, Montoya is 22nd in points after 15 races. The team’s third driver, 22-year-old Reed Sorenson, is 32nd. Both have only one top-five finish this season. (Pruett, a road-racing specialist, is substituting for Sorenson today.)

Franchitti, a NASCAR rookie this year, has been in only nine races after breaking an ankle in an April crash. He hoped to rebound this weekend, but his car was too slow to qualify for today’s race.

It was the latest example of a slump that’s frustrated Ganassi’s teams and prompted the owner to recently shuffle Montoya’s crew chiefs -- twice -- in search of a turnaround.

“I’m not content where we are,” Ganassi said. “We feel we’re better than what the standings indicate. We expect to be running better than we are and we will run better.”

Ganassi and his drivers said the team has not mastered NASCAR’s new Car of Tomorrow as well as the powerhouse teams of Hendrick Motorsports, Roush Fenway Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing.

But Ganassi and his team also acknowledged that they weren’t working together to make the whole team stronger.

“Every person was pulling a different direction,” said Montoya, who drives the No. 42 Dodge. “There was no communication, no [one] on the team saying, ‘This is where we need to go.’ ”

Ganassi and Montoya both publicly griped about the team’s performance this spring, but Montoya said Friday that the team finally appears to be melding under Ganassi’s direction.

“Everybody’s really pushing the same way now,” he said. “It’s going to take time and you have to build on it. But I didn’t come to NASCAR to run 20th every week.”

Ganassi, 50, still lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh but is constantly traveling between his race shops in Indianapolis and Concord, N.C., and to races around the country.

He started as a driver himself, competing in the Indy 500 in the 1980s. But with a business degree from Duquesne University, he formed his own team in 1990.

“It’s a difficult business,” said Ganassi, conceding that “yes, I can be impatient when things should be happening faster than they’re happening, or when I’ve given people enough time to accomplish something and they don’t.

“At the same time . . . I’ve given a lot of people fair chances,” he said. “First and foremost racing is about performance. I live for racing -- this is all I do. I put everything I have into this sport.”

Before his failed qualifying run Friday, Franchitti said, “We’re all frustrated, none of us want to be running where we’re running.” But he said Ganassi was “very focused on making it better. The last month or so, I think he’s redoubled his efforts.”

Montoya agreed and, when asked whether the team was finally turning the corner, replied: “I don’t think we’re turning it yet. But I think we can see the corner.”

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james.peltz@latimes.com