PERENNIAL WINNER; Steve Lewis is a team owner who makes Roger Penske look lazy.(Competition)

Byline: CURT CAVIN

There are many men like Steve Lewis who have been in love with motorsports from the moment a race engine first pierced their ears. But there is almost no one like Steve Lewis from the standpoint of turning that passion into a racing dynasty.

Lewis' race team has won nine of the past 11 national midget championships. It has become the envy of every driver chasing a dream. In his business life, Lewis has grown his Perfor-mance Racing Industry trade show into one of the year's top attractions for hard-core racers. Some 40,000 people gathered last month in Indianapolis for the 16th annual event.

It's funny how these things happen. Lewis, who captured the United States Auto Club's 2003 midget title with J.J. Yeley, was raised in Southern California as the son of a Berkeley-reared attorney. One weekend, when there wasn't much else to do, the family attended their first, and presumed-to-be-final, midget race at Orange Show Speedway in San Bernardino. Lewis was not much older than 10 or 12, but he remembers how good the hot dogs and popcorn tasted. The noise wasn't bad either, and the competition was fierce. Like most youngsters, Lewis fell for the first race winner he ever laid eyes on. Billy Cantrell became his hero.

"You've got to understand that I was raised in this little town of Colton, and that was before the Lakers, the Dodgers and roller derby,'' Lewis said. "These were the late 1940s, early 1950s, for heaven's sakes.''

Lewis, who now lives in Laguna Beach, remembers Cantrell using a Curtis Kraft midget to beat Johnny Moorhouse, Rodger Ward and others. Lewis said he was hooked from the get-go, and from that single race came four or five events a year for the family. When Lewis turned 16, he went more often, although it usually was without permission.

"I'd tell my parents I was going to the library,'' he said. "But when the report cards came out, my parents couldn't understand [the low grades]. That's when the cat came out of the bag and we had to restructure my life.''