Charles W Luzier / Reuters

"I'm committed to (NASCAR) for the long term," Juan Pablo Montoya says

Last December, while visiting Bogota for Christmas, he stopped by the Autodromo de Tocancipa, a Bogota area road course where he began his racing career. His celebrity attracted a throng as he wandered through the pits and garage area, visiting with old friends and signing autographs. Young drivers about to compete in the Six Hours of Bogota, the season's final and biggest race, eyed Montoya with no small amount of envy. He has raced to places that exist only in their dreams.

Sebastian Moreno, 23, lives in Pasto, south of Bogota. He raced last season in a formula series in Spain and hopes to advance another step this year.

"Thanks to Montoya, people here have a lot more interest in racing and more general knowledge about it," he says. "Ten years ago, no one was talking about racing. We never had a hero like him. But here it's still tough to race. Only the good ones succeed. There are no racing teams. It's all families. You can't make money off racing here. A lot of it is improvisation."

Montoya raced largely because his father, Pablo, made the finances work long enough for the rest of the world to realize his son had unusual potential. Before the big breaks came, he mortgaged his house in Bogota to keep Juan Pablo racing, to keep the dream going.

Montoya's lifestyle will be vastly different this season as he takes on a much more crowded schedule and replaces Monaco, Montreal and Barcelona with Talladega, Darlington and Bristol.

Fitting into the NASCAR culture won't be difficult, Montoya says."This is about the racing for me," he says. "I want to race."

In every other series Montoya has attempted, he has adapted easily and won quickly. NASCAR probably will be tougher.

"It's innate with him," says open-wheel racer Jaime Guerrero, a longtime friend. "He loves this stuff so much that he always prefers to be at the track. He can take anybody's car and in five laps have better times than somebody who had been in it their whole life. It's just that he gets it. He picks up the cars so easily."

The next challenge begins at Daytona.