WHEATFIELD | Amidst the spare tires and the rusty fan, the TV and the tall trophies, the toolbox and the three men gathered around the No. 21 car, it's easy to miss the candids in the corner of Keith Allen's garage. (Slideshow)

There is Nick Allen, Keith's nephew, at 13, tearing around the track in a black go-kart. At 16, leaning out the window of his mini-stock car. At 19, behind the wheel of a red-and-black modified car.

These are the still-frame moments Randy Allen would prefer to dwell on, the photos that paint a pleasant, albeit incomplete, portrait of his son's burgeoning racing career.

Somewhere, Randy has stashed away the pictures of the old No. 21 car -- what was left of it, at least -- of Nick laid up in the hospital, of the night that was nearly his son's last on the track.

"I don't want to see anything like that again," Randy said.

Seeing Nick standing next to his new No. 21 car in Uncle Keith's garage, one wonders how the lanky 25-year-old Wheatfield resident and Kankakee Valley grad could ever cram his 6-foot-5 frame into the small opening above the driver's side panel -- let alone climb out of it after rolling four times down the front straightaway of Medaryville's Shadyhill Speedway in 2006.

Randy, a track official at Shadyhill on the weekends, was the first to reach Nick that night.

"Nick, Nick, you OK?" Randy asked.

"Yeah, I'm OK, dad."

With that, Nick hopped out of the car, gave a wave to the crowd and walked away like nothing had happened.

He would not walk away the next time. On June 30, 2007, Randy was again first on the scene of Nick's wreck. Diving through the passenger side of the car, Randy saw his son struggling, unsuccessfully, to free himself from the crushed cabin.

"'Nick, settle down, you're OK. We'll get you out,'" Randy reassured his son. "He said, 'Dad, I'm not this time. This time, I'm hurt.'

"He had never said that before."

Nick had never been in a wreck this bad, either. Moments earlier, he was pinched into the wall and laid on his breaks hard. Too hard. When his back tires locked up and the engine cut out, his car spun sideways and came to rest smack in the middle of the front straightaway.

Nick looked up just in time to see a car come out of Turn 2 and clobber his driver's side at more than 70 mph.

"It took me a few minutes to realize how bad it was," Nick said quietly.

The extent of Nick's injuries wouldn't be known until he was cut out of the car -- a gruelling task that took more than an hour -- and airlifted to a hospital in South Bend. There, doctors discovered eight breaks in his left femur -- which they stabilized with a rod that stretches from his pelvis to his knee -- and five more in his pelvis. His tailbone was also broken, and one of his lungs was bruised.

"It wasn't any fun," Nick said of being confined to the couch for a few months and rehabbing for a couple more.

Late last season, a fellow driver offered Nick a chance to race his car. He said no thanks. He wasn't ready, mentally or physically, and he wasn't going to rush his recovery.

His season was shot. He could accept that, even if he was ranked 13th nationally in the UMP Modified points standings at the time of his crash.

But was his career?

Only Uncle Keith could answer that.

Behind Uncle Keith's garage, behind the black trailer that has hauled the No. 21 car as far as Florida, behind the apple trees that Keith and Randy's parents planted in their adjacent yard, there is evidence of an old dirt track.

Obscured by trees and overrun by weeds, it's still easy to spot if you know where to look.

As a kid, Nick, who grew up two houses down, and Uncle Keith raced their four-wheelers around the same swath of grass so often, it ground the grass to dirt and created a ridge around the oval-shaped track that emerged.

This is where Nick, whose parents bought him his first go-kart at age 4, learned to race. Against the uncle who saw him as the son he never had.

The uncle who is out in his garage with Nick several nights a week working on the car. The uncle who has financed much of Nick's racing career.

The uncle who took Nick's wreck as hard as anyone.

"I said we were done after that," Keith, a former racer himself, said.

But the more he thought about it, the more Keith reconsidered. After much deliberation, he decided to buy a new car, minus the engine salvaged from the old No. 21, last March.

Later that month, with dad in the stands, Nick nervously made his return to dirt racing downstate at Brownstown Speedway.

"I had some butterflies," said Nick, who works for Hoffman Construction, one of his sponsors. "In the practice laps, I didn't feel real comfortable."

But once he whizzed around the track a few times, his confidence returned. Hoping only for a top-10 finish, he ended up winning the thing. It was the first of three $1,000 checks he has collected for first-place finishes this season.

As of last week, Nick ranked 26th nationally in the UMP Modified points standings and seventh in the state. It's been his best season to date driving the No. 21 car, a number he stole from childhood racing idol Billy Moyer.

"They called him Mr. Smooth," Randy said of Moyer. "He was always smooth on the track. Nick's kind of got that reputation. He's pretty smooth."

Nick has also developed a reputation as one of the most affable drivers at Shadyhill.

"You wouldn't believe the number of people that came to the hospital to see him," Randy said.

Or the steady stream of flowers and balloons and get-well cards that were still arriving the house two months later. Or the number of people that crowd Nick's car after a race.

"You can't even see his car. They just swarm him." Randy said. "I'm very proud of him. I couldn't be any prouder."

Indeed, Nick shows no signs of outgrowing his humble, sometimes shy, nature. Even if he makes it to the next level.

"I've always wanted to race the late models and be one of the guys that just travels around and races for a living," Nick said.

"I've always wanted to be a professional driver."