The following is an excerpt from Class of '99 by John Oreovicz. Relive the 1999 CART season like never before with this masterful combination of contemporary reporting and new interviews with many of the key players, all of which bring the year’s personalities and storylines to life with nuance, depth, and reflection.

Carl Haas was eccentric, intensely private, and almost always a soft-spoken man. But he was shouting and screaming and generally causing a ruckus in Pit Lane at Twin Ring Motegi on April 8, 1999.

The subject of Haas’s wrath was Juan Pablo Montoya. The brash young rookie had just been involved in—directly caused, in Haas’s mind—a jarring crash with Michael Andretti during practice for round two of the 1999 CART championship, and Newman/Haas Racing’s lead driver was steaming. So too was his boss when he stormed down to the Chip Ganassi Racing garage to confront Montoya, or anybody else who got in his way.

Montoya’s first line of defense was his race engineer, Morris Nunn, along with Ganassi himself, who soon got into a heated argument with Haas. After a bit of foul language and gesticulation, Haas grabbed the enormous cigar that is perennially clenched in his jaw, threw it at the ground, and he started slapping at Ganassi’s chest. A crewman intervened and Montoya, upon seeing the commotion, quickly emerged from the garage and tried to calm things down. “There’s no problem,” Ganassi said a few hours later. “We both just got a bit hot at the time.”

A few minutes earlier, a similarly heated argument had gone down between Montoya and Andretti. The drivers blamed each other, but CART Chief Steward Wally Dallenbach put the onus on Montoya, whom he fined $5,000 and put on probation. “Had to be done,” Dallenbach said. “That could have been avoided.”

“I’m not sure what disappoints me more—the move he pulled, or the way he handled the situation afterward,” fumed Andretti. “He laughed at me in the hospital and said it was my fault. He thought it was funny. That’s the mentality you’re dealing with. I told Wally if he drives like that at Michigan, he’ll kill somebody. I hope he changes his attitude.”

Target/Ganassi Racing issued a bland statement in which Montoya took responsibility for the incident. But behind the scenes, he was more candid. “He tried to intimidate me,” Juan insisted. “I catch him on the back straight, I’m going alongside, and he turns in like I’m not there. I locked up the fronts trying not to hit him. So, on the front straight I get in his draft. As I start to pass him, he turns left. I don’t lift off, so we crash.”

They both played nice for the television camera when interviewed by ESPN’s Gary Gerould. “He apologized, and we go on,” Andretti said. “He just has to learn he can’t use his race car as a weapon out there, and that’s what he did.” Responded Montoya: “Yeah, yeah, it’s perfect. I don’t see why side by side we cannot race each other.”

CHIP GANASSI

“I don’t think Juan had any remorse. I mean, I guess he was sad that he crashed, but he wasn’t going to back down. That was an early sign, one of Juan’s signature moves. He just didn’t back down, whether it was Michael Andretti or Michael Schumacher. People just moved over for Schumacher, and Juan didn’t do that. You were going to have to work to get around him. Juan was going to stake his claim, and he wasn’t going to back down from those things. That was one of his trademarks—he didn’t back down for anybody.”

JIMMY VASSER:

“What I remember the most is Chip and Carl, the two of them face to face. I think a cigar maybe hit the ground. There was a little bit of tension there. But that kind of showed Montoya’s fabric or his makeup. He wanted to show a top guy on a top team—Michael Andretti, one of the greatest who’s ever run in the sport—that he wasn’t going to take any shit on the track. Kind of like the new kid in school picking a fight with the bully in the schoolyard. One thing you can say about Montoya, he was never intimidated, as far as I could tell, in any situation throughout his whole career. Like he did in Formula 1 with Michael Schumacher. I don’t know if that was him naturally, or how his dad raised him to be, perhaps, when he was younger.”

All of this happened halfway around the world from America, but news was starting to travel at a much faster rate as the internet era unfolded. CART had invested heavily at the start of 1999 in a partnership with Quokka Sports to create a state-of-the-art website, featuring newfangled innovations like live audio and video streaming. The Ganassi/Haas bust-up was captured on camera by the Quokka crew, and it immediately provided the fancy new CART.com website with video footage that would have been instant viral gold had YouTube and social media been around back then.

Located two hours north of Tokyo in the Tochigi prefecture, Twin Ring Motegi looked like something out of the future compared to most racetracks back home in the USA. Created by Honda and christened on August 1, 1997, Motegi was envisioned as a state-of-the-art motorsports complex highlighted by a 1.549-mile oval and a 2.983-mile road course built to FIA standard. The site was also home to the Honda Collection Hall, a 100,000-square-foot shrine to Honda’s history in manufacturing and racing cars and motorcycles, along with several other fan-friendly activities that made the facility a car or motorcycle enthusiast’s dream even when there was no racing taking place. Honda even built a five-star, 135-room hotel on site for competitors featuring Italian, Chinese, and traditional Japanese restaurants. Chip Ganassi and Carl Haas settled their brief beef over cocktails at the Motegi hotel bar.

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