Is Montoya feeling IndyCar championship pressure?

• Juan Montoya enters Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course with bad luck.
• The points leader had his worst finish of the season two weeks ago and saw his practice shortened.
• Former Ohio State football great Joey Galloway will be the Grand Marshal this weekend.

LEXINGTON – Juan Pablo Montoya comes to Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course with a 42-point lead in the Verizon IndyCar Series championship chase with three races to go.

However, the international racing star and former CART champion is also coming off his worst finish of the season, making just nine laps at Iowa two weeks ago because of a broken part. Then in Friday morning’s first practice session, he sat in the pits for most of it as Team Penske fixed his car’s alternator.

“At the moment, you don’t even think about it,” he said of his standing in the points relative to his recent streak of bad luck. “You think about it when you’re home and look at everything, but there is nothing you can do.”

Earlier this week, his closest pursuers in the championship hunt – Graham Rahal and Scott Dixon – talked about how they think Montoya will manage himself down the stretch.

“I think Juan has to take more of a conservative role,” Rahal said. “I mean, it’s his championship to lose. Forty-two points is a lot of points. At this point I think he has to be more conservative, just get to the end. We’re more in an attack mode. We have nothing to lose and we’re going to try to catch him as quick as we can.”

But Montoya didn’t want to hear what his competitors thought.

“I don’t really care. (Rahal) can think whatever he wants; I’m OK with that,” Montoya said before finishing 22nd in Friday’s practice, a full second behind Dixon’s pace-setting time of 1:05.9645 (123.23 mph).

Montoya won the 1999 CART title as a rookie and the Indianapolis 500 the following season before embarking on a successful career in Formula One then NASCAR. He returned to IndyCar last season and won this year’s Indy 500, so he’s not lacking in confidence.

“You’ve got to run,” he said. “You’ve got to race. You’ve got to execute. You’ve got to do your work. That’s all you can do. You’ve got three races and we’ve got to be doing what we’ve been doing all year and then see what happens. It’s about making the car drive good. That’s it. That’s all we can do."

Buckeye Grand Marshal

Former OSU great and NFL receiver Joey Galloway, who is now one of ESPN’s top college football analysts, will be this year’s Grand Marshal for the Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio.

Galloway was bit by the racing bug almost a decade ago when he went to a Daytona 500.

“I went one time and had a terrific experience,” he said. “Since then it’s been that I want to get to certain tracks to see how the other tracks are. I’ve just went up to Michigan. I’ve been to Talladega; I’ve been to Richmond; I’ve been to Vegas; I went to Kentucky that first year and that was a debacle, but I plan to get back there. I’ve been to Dallas a few times. I need to get to a Bristol night race.”

But this will be his first experience with IndyCar.

“The only thing I don’t like about IndyCar is they don’t tell us all the time how fast they are going when you’re watching them on TV,” Galloway said. “Because I’m so impressed with what they and how they do it and the fact that they can get those cars to go that fast for that long, I want to know just how fast they’re going out there. But I love watching it.’

Hot Laps

Team Penske has posted five 1-2 finishes at Mid-Ohio … Drivers for Penske have led 639 laps in 61 combined starts in Lexington … Paul Tracy has the most runner-up finishes in CART/IndyCar races at Mid-Ohio with four, while Mario Andretti ended in second place three times … Bobby Rahal finished on eight podiums in his open-wheel career at Mid-Ohio, winning two and finishing second twice … Dario Franchitti and Danny Sullivan were third three times.

rmccurdy@gannett.com

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Twitter: @McMotorsport

Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio Friday Practice

•Top 10: 1. Scott Dixon 1:05.9645 (123.23 mph), 2. Sebastien Bourdais 1:06.0190, 3. Will Power 1:06.0781, 4. Graham Rahal 1:06.1049, 5 Takuma Sato 1:06.1361, 6. Tony Kanaan 1:06.1545, 7. Jack Hawksworth 1:06.2906, 8. Marco Andretti 1:06.3557, 8. Josef Newgarden 1:06.3823, 10. Ryan Hunter-Reay 1:06.4977.

•Others: 11. Helio Castroneves 1:06.5157, 12. Ryan Briscoe 1:06.5463, 18. Simon Pagenaud 1:06.7361, 20. Charlie Kimball 1:06.8429, 22. Juan Pablo Montoya 1:06.9930.

•Track Record: Dario Franchitti (1999) and Gil de Ferran (2000) 1:05.347, 124.394 mph.