The American way of motor racing has no more persuasive advocate than the man in the neat black overalls sitting patiently in front of a battery of microphones and cameras at Daytona International Speedway in Florida.

Next month, here at one of the oldest and most venerated racetracks in the country, Juan Pablo Montoya will make his first official start as a Nascar driver, but over the weekend he took part in the Daytona 24-hour race for sports cars, the historic and quirky test of endurance which traditionally marks the start of the racing season in America.

“Like climbing Everest,” the 31-year-old Colombian says of his decision to swap the brilliant and capricious world of Formula One for the thundering, growling giants of the good ol’ boys.

From now on, Montoya will be flogging motor oil, beer and breakfast cereal to middle America, not blue-chip investments to global corporations and, in the cool sunshine of a Florida morning, there is not one hint of regret at the unprecedented shift in his cultural horizons.

“Just the opposite,” he explains. “As every day goes by I enjoy myself more and more about this. Yes, there are a lot of races in Nascar, but the racing is the best, side by side, real races.” The thought brings his voice to a pitch of excitement. “Do you know, in my first race, my crew chief said I’d passed 70 cars. 70? Unbelievable.”

In Formula One, Montoya could go whole races without passing anybody and whole seasons without any realistic hope of winning the world title. He did a lot of tyre testing, which he loathed, and made several well-known enemies, which at least made life more interesting.

Montoya’s arrival in Formula One was marked by an audacious passing manoeuvre on the untouchable Michael Schumacher in Brazil; his sudden departure after five-and-a-half largely unfulfilled years with Williams and McLaren was unmourned and almost mocked. “Why should anyone want to race round in circles every weekend?”, Schumacher asked.

So Montoya has returned to his heartland, to the place where he has always felt instinctively at home. In his early days as a struggling young driver, before he became a Champ Car champion and won the Indy 500 as a rookie, he and his father, Pablo, would hitch a ride in a refrigerated plane taking consignments of flowers from Bogota to Miami, huddling beneath their overcoats to ward off the cold.

As long as he had his helmet and a car to drive, Montoya was happy, which makes him an honorary graduate of the school of racing epitomised by the Daytona 24-hour race, America’s Le Mans, and the history of the town itself.

To find Daytona, you travel an hour north from Orlando and search for the longest stretch of unspoilt beach on America’s east coast. Once the winter playground of the rich and famous, the economy of Daytona Beach has been inextricably linked to the racetrack built nearly 50 years ago by Bill France, the founder of Nascar.

Even when Hurricane Charlie devastated much of the coast in 2004, the racetrack prospered, attracting crowds of 250,000 to the Daytona 500.

Montoya is relishing the democracy of life on the Nascar track and the idea that the driver can make a difference.

“Even if you don’t have the fastest car, you still have a chance in Nascar,” he says. “In F1, you don’t. I ticked everything I wanted to do in F1. Yes, it would have been nice to win a championship, but realistically the percentage chance was too low. It wasn’t worth it in the end.

“I had a blast in F1, the cars were a lot of fun to drive, you can’t take that away from them. But I wanted to find more interesting racing.

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