Nicholas Latifi's propensity to crash has raised questions about his ability but former Williams driver Juan Pablo Montoya thinks he's good enough to drive for the team. Here's what Montoya had to say to VegasInsider:

“I think he (Nicholas Latifi) is. He has made mistakes. A lot of silly mistakes.”

“If you look at what he was doing at the end of last year, he could outqualify George (Russell) a couple of times. He was right there. So is he better than Lewis (Hamilton)?“

“He's not comfortable. Something with the Mercedes engine and how the power is coming in. It's probably really hard to put the power down."

"If you look at the crashes, it's always when putting the power down. He crashed like that last year in Abu Dhabi and he's done it again. Looking at the incident with Lance (Stroll), I don't think it was his fault. I think Lance didn't expect him to pass, and he was committed. And when you are committed; that's it. He has cost the team."

“Does it really cost that much? I mean, the expensive thing is the man-hours. They don't have to make new moulds. They are already made. The amount of hours is where the value goes up. The amount of time it takes to build a piece. From a materials point of view, I don't think it's that expensive.” 

“The problem when you crash is, if you have ten people building carbon pieces, instead of them focusing on building new pieces, they need to build pieces to be able to race today. Not two months from now. So the pieces that will be coming two months from now, if you spent three weeks working on the old pieces and spare parts to rebuild a car, it means that the new parts are going to be coming three weeks later.”

“Because you have a budget and a cap. It's not like before when you could go out and hire thirty more people if you were a big team.” 

“It's a bad vicious circle when you crash, but the teams are preparing normally. They'll have two or three parts of most of them, just in case. But they get to a point where they don't have enough parts if it happens again. Look at what happened with Mick (Schumacher) in Saudi. They said 'that's a big crash, if we race tomorrow and he crashes, we don't have parts for Australia'. So they decided to make a smart decision.”

“Williams is comfortable just building the car again.”

“When you are a race car diver, you don't care. It's their (the team's) problem, not yours."

"You just want to go fast and the team will figure it out. With the years you start to understand how much pain you can cause a team when you crash. It's not like you crash on purpose. You are just trying.“

“Latifi is doing a really good job and I think, he thought, that the way he was running last year against George, and when (Alex) Albon came with the experience he had from Red Bull, he could come and beat him."

"When that didn’t happen you need to try and go quicker. The only way to go quicker is to push the envelope further. When you do that, you end up bouncing off the walls. That's just the reality of it.”

Thanks again to VegasInsider. You can find the entire interview here.

Adam has been a race fan since the first time he went through the tunnel under the Daytona International Speedway more than 30 years ago. He has had the privilege of traveling to races all across the state of Florida (as well as one race in Ohio), watching nearly everything with a motor compete for fame and glory, as well as participating in various racing schools to get the feel of what racecar drivers go through every week.  

Adam spent several years covering motorsports for Examiner.com., where he had the opportunity to see the racing world from behind the scenes as well as the grandstands. He invites everyone to follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus, and looks forward to sharing his enthusiasm for all things racing with the readers of SpeedwayDigest.com.

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