Four-time Cup champion Jeff Gordon once swapped cars with Juan Pablo Montoya for an exhibition run.

The time the stock car star and the Formula One racer spent in each other's cars at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was brief and told them little about how they would fare in a race.

But, now, Montoya has left F1 behind and is taking aim at competing with Gordon and the rest of the Cup drivers for championships. He got off to a solid start Friday at Talladega with a third-place finish in a 250-mile ARCA race, his stock car debut.

Montoya even managed to maintain control of his car and come back through the field after another driver slammed into his right-side door.

``You can watch all you want from the top of the truck and on TV and, until you get out there and recognize it and feel it, you don't realize what you're capable of doing and what the cars are really doing when you're out there,'' Gordon said.

He said racing on Talladega's fast and frightening 2.66-mile oval was good for Montoya, but it has little to do with most of the other tracks he will face in NASCAR.

``An ARCA race at Talladega is just kind of an introduction,'' Gordon said. ``It's a whole lot different when you start going to Bristol and Martinsville and New Hampshire and then the 1.5-mile tracks.

``This was a good experience for him. If he had come out of that race with a win there would have been a tremendous amount of pressure on him that I don't think even he wants. It couldn't have gone much better for him the first time out.''