MAYETTA ? It’s not an easy question to ask of a teenage rookie driver: What do you know about the night your father was trapped in a burning race car and ultimately life-flighted to a trauma center?

Trent Herrington, 17 and heading into his junior year at Lawrence High, appeared to find it easy to answer.

“He went into a wall going really fast,” Trent said of father Rob Herrington, a Lawrence entrepreneur. “He was in the car for like 40 minutes, and there was a fire, but he used a Halon fire system, same as I’ve got in my car, to put the fire out. They use these things called the ‘jaws of life’ to rip cars apart to get the drivers out. It broke. So they had to get torches out and cut him out. Then he was life-flighted somewhere. They said his blood pressure dropped really quick while he was on the ride, and they thought he wasn’t going to make it. Luckily, he did.”

That was five years ago at the I-70 Speedway in Odessa, Mo., when he hit the wall driving 130 mph racing a NASCAR modified car.

“I remember you wanted me to go to the races that night, but I went to spend the night at somebody’s house,” Trent said to his father.

Rob: “Yeah, glad you didn’t go.”

Trent: “They woke me up in the middle of the night and said, ‘Your dad got in a wreck.’ I was like, ‘Well, what am I supposed to do about it now? You want me to drive up there at 1 in the morning?”’

Rob’s older son, Travis, a Lawrence firefighter and emergency medical technician, gave up racing when he saw too much during his EMT work.

Trent had so many reasons so close to him to think better of buckling up and standing on it on a track packed with cars driven up to 90 mph.

He studied those, and in the end followed his heart. It turned out he’s a natural behind the wheel. He recently ranked as high as second in the Pony stock introductory class at Thunder Hill Speedway, a dirt track in Mayetta, a country town north of Topeka.

“I thought about it a lot, but it just looked like so much fun,” Trent said. “I decided to take the risk.”

The reward, he said, has been more than worth it.

“It’s been a lot more fun than I thought it would be,” he said. “I had no idea what it was going to be like, seven other cars banging on you, trying to get to the first spot. It’s just too much fun.”

For his father, setting up the car – determining tire pressures, etc. – appears nearly as enjoyable as driving it is for the son.

At this stage of their lives, the most meaningful aspect of what’s going on here, the part of it that if all stays safe, will have the longest-reaching impact, is more obvious to the father than the son.

“With kids at this age today, it’s a tough time,” Rob said. “I like knowing where Trent is on Saturday nights. You put in five to eight hours to get it ready to race it for 10 minutes, and that’s if nothing’s wrong with it. We’ve spent more time together this year than we have in a long time. And then on Saturday nights, rock and roll. It’s loads of fun.”

The father and their sons are into Pony stock cars now. The mother and their two daughters compete with a pony of another sort. They do horse eventing. Susan, the mom, and Wendy, the younger daughter, also have a company called “Pony Up,” giving horseback riding lessons.

“Trent and Travis are 12 years apart so they don’t know each other,” Rob said. “The first race we went to, Travis took over in the pits and started giving Trent advice on where to drive the car. I bit my tongue and just stood back and grinned because they were getting to know one another a little bit. And they’re so different.”

Racing attracts diverse personality types, such as Rob, the classic Type A – outgoing, boundless energy, talkative – and Trent, who has an understated James Dean sort of cool about him. Confident, in a mellow sort of way. Naps on the way to races, sometimes even between heats and features. Makes his words count.

“It comes down to how much you can stand on the gas without wrecking,” was how Trent summed up racing as he adjusted the valves on the motor from a garage at 5th and Michigan owned by one of his sponsors, Westside 66.

During the nearly hour-long ride to Thunder Hill, on a mid-90s evening with no breeze to soften the sun, father and son talk racing.

“Tell them about what happened in the pits the first time you raced,” Trent suggested.

Rob obliged: “Two guys got together and were just beating on each other. After the race they both took their helmets off and one guy said, ‘I’m going to hit you upside the head with this crowbar.’ The other guy said, ‘Why don’t you just bring it on.’ I’m standing there with my mouth open and the guy proceeded to take a swipe at him. The other guy stepped up and took the crowbar away from him and hit him on the side of the head and popped his eye out. From then on, his eye pointed off into space. They put it back in, but it didn’t attach. And they were good friends after that.”

The father said it’s best to keep the helmet on five minutes after the race, to let tempers cool, and these words would become prophetic before the night was over.

As they moved along the country road on the way into the track, cows were sitting in a pond. A little farther down the road, to the left, is a cemetery, which brought out Trent’s gallows humor.

“That’s where they bury the drivers after they wreck,” he said.

When the topic turned to drag racers, the father pumped his fist after the son said, “Real men turn left.”

After the drivers’ meeting, the cars are required to drive around to roll the muddy track, creating the job of having to knock that mud off in the pits. The hot laps and heats packed in the track some more.

Rob was nervous the track wouldn’t be rolled to their dry-slick liking because on this night the Pony stock is the second class on the card. The fears were unjustified. Trent, following his father’s instructions to the letter, stayed on the inside and made the other drivers try to pass him from the top. Shortly after he took the lead, another car that had tried and failed to pass him on the outside rammed into a third car and on his way down the track cut Trent’s right rear tire, forcing him to the pits with his first DNF (did not finish) of the season.

Afterward, the racer who cut his tire began hollering to Rob, “You need to settle him down. He’s overdriving that car.” When Rob disagreed and stood his ground, the driver asked him if he wanted to fight and shoved him in the chest with two hands.

At that point, Rob’s business partner, Alexei Nikitin, a former Greco-Roman wrestler from Russia, stepped in between them and very calmly asked with thick accent, “Is there a problem here?”

Not anymore there wasn’t, though the driver later threatened to take Trent off the track the next week, not realizing the teenager would be joining his family the next two weeks on vacation.

Normally, the Herringtons would have stayed to watch the rest of the races. The incident killed their appetite and they headed home, getting back at about midnight, another eight hours of father-and-son time shared on a Saturday. How many other fathers and teenage sons can say the same?