Driving the No. 11 Conquistador Brewery Chevrolet, I finished the ’97 season sixteenth in the point standings with zero wins. Not exactly statistics to celebrate, but Marco had faith in me, and I had become sort of family, as by then Pita and I had begun dating seriously. She was in her final year at UCLA and came one Sunday to watch me race at Irwindale Speedway. She, Marco, and I went for dinner afterward, and when Marco retired to the hotel, she and I stayed out partying well into the morning, parting with a goodnight kiss. After that, we kept in touch via telephone every now and then until she graduated in June—then she was accompanying her father to every race. I hadn’t wanted a girlfriend. I was too busy. A typical day had me putting in fifteen hours at the racetrack. Pita, however, was persistent, she was always around, and she was a lot of fun. At first we were spending one or two nights a week together. Then it was three or four. Then it was every night, falling to sleep together, waking together. She didn’t know much about stock car racing, but she learned quickly. Moreover, she was a people person by nature, and she fell in love with the glamor of the industry. The buzz of the press conferences, the socializing at the press dinners, the race day parades and post-race functions. What she didn’t like so much were the pit lizards, or groupies, who always seemed to know where I hung out away from the track. Pita was a confident, attractive woman, but seeing these girls throwing themselves all over race car drivers drove her crazy, and it was the source of our first few fights. So to prove to her I wasn’t interested in any of them, I proposed to her in Charlotte, South Carolina, on a clear night in the center of an asphalt oval.

The following season I recorded my first win at the Chicagoland Speedway and finished seventh in the point standings. Sadly, that was the year Marco died from a brain aneurysm and Jesus took over as Chairman and CEO of Conquistador Brewery. His first order of business was to disband the racing team and sell the operation. He argued the costs of sponsoring a race car outweighed the publicity generated, as the company’s three varieties of beers had yet to receive a significant boost in sales. I didn’t know what a “significant boost” entailed, and I didn’t care much. Aside from not wanting to be under Jesus’s thumb—we’d enjoyed a healthy dislike for each other pretty much right off the bat—I had a slew of new offers from other teams.