Marco Andretti doesn’t care much about Juan Pablo Montoya’s impending move to NASCAR, and he’s in no hurry to see the Formula One world the way his grandfather and father did.

“I’m 19 years old, I drive Indy cars. . . . I’m happy,” Andretti said.

Marco would seem to have the potential to try Formula One, Norbert Haug, vice president of Mercedes-Benz motorsports, said recently, but he’d have to get serious soon about racing in the European junior formulas.

Mario, the 1969 Indy winner and 1978 Formula One champion, has pointed Marco in that direction for years. Meanwhile, Michael had a miserable partial season in Europe in 1993 and would like to keep his son on his team to win the Indy 500 as Michael never did.

For the time being, anyway, the younger Andretti is content to follow his father while keeping Europe in the back of his mind. He’d like to try it, but he knows that if he went now, he’d be distracted by the lure of Indy.

“If I go over there, it’s not going to be a 15-year deal. I need to figure out how to do it,” Andretti said. “Timing is huge over there to try make things work. It has to be right, and that’s the only way I would do it.”

But what about the NASCAR option?

Mario won the 1967 Daytona 500 in his limited NASCAR run. Stock cars have become the preferred destination for young American racers, and for at least one Colombian, too. Montoya, the 2000 Indy winner and a seven-time grand prix winner, showed that Sunday, when he announced he’d leave F1 to join Chip Ganassi’s Nextel Cup team.

But it’s not a real option for Andretti now. He’s having too much fun driving Indy cars.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” he said. “That’s probably where I want to be when I’m at the end of my career. I wouldn’t say (Montoya is) at the end of his career at all, but when I have no other options, that’s what I definitely would do is go there for the money.”

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