Tom Beckman is a pretty safe guy.

He always wears a helmet while driving his blue and white Pontiac GTO 90 mph around tight corners of a track.

When crashing grill-first into a wall, the 40-year-old Bristow resident thinks about how he's going to afford it.

Police officers he trains in Fairfax learn how not to wreck their cars when pursuing suspects.

Beckman’s motivation for living life to its fullest whenever possible comes from a near-death incident when he was involved in a shooting while working as a police officer.

"It made me realize tomorrow's not guaranteed. You know, if I'm fortunate enough to be an old man laying in my deathbed, I don't want to be laying there thinking I wish I had done this, I wish I had done this...," said Beckman, who graduated from Fairfax High School in 1986 and moved to Bristow in 2002. "You can't live life afraid."

During his youth, Beckman raced bicycles at BMX tracks in Fairfax and loved watching racecars zip across the 3/8ths-mile asphalt track at Old Dominion Speedway in Manassas.

Little did he know one day he would be racing on that same track as he ran mini-stock cars.

Beckman caught the racing bug hook, line and sinker at a Richard Petty racing school in North Carolina around 1995. When he came back home to Virginia, he was hooked and got to work developing his skills as a driver and a crew member.

At age 25, Beckman started racing 700-pound go-carts at a dirt track in Ashland and won almost a dozen races. Transitioning to mini-stock cars proved to be quite a challenge as they weighed more than a ton with a V-4 engine and 230 horsepower.

He succeeded early on, winning the most-improved driver award in 2002, the same year he recorded his first win at Old Dominion.

"But that first win; you know, you never forget your first one. And finally getting that first win, all the blood sweat and tears that you put into these thing -- the busted knuckles, the late nights -- it all comes together right there, when you're in victory lane and you're thinking, Wow, we did it."

Topping the field of about eight or nine other cars may not have been a huge deal compared to some NASCAR events with dozens of drivers, but it validated the dedication he put into the sport and the time he spent working the track at Old Dominion.

"Just racing at Old Dominion gets you used to racing around other cars, you know, going into a corner, setting somebody up to pass them or holding your line when you're being passed, you know? I learned that at Old Dominion. No matter what track you go to, that all transfers," he said.

Now that he competes with a full-size, V6 car in the ISCARS series, which used to be the NASCAR Goody's Dash series, Beckman is set to face 1986 Daytona 500 winner Geoff Bodine.

Getting through the racing season now presents a different challenge compared to the earlier part of the decade with a better economy when Beckman drove mini-stock cars and had sponsorships from racefanwatches.com, Valvoline and several local mom-and-pop garages.

"Once I moved out of that into the late models, you know, they still helped, but it was taking a lot more money to fund a late model than it was a mini stock," he said. "So that really cut back on how much racing I was doing. I was racing basically whenever I could."

Beckman and his all-volunteer team pay for the car themselves for the most part as they are still recruiting sponsors for this season.

"They've been watching their dollars. You've really got to prove to them that you've got to get them out there that are going to see them," said Beckman's crew chief Dave Gantt of potential sponsors.

Last season, for instance, Beckman ended up colliding into a wall, which is a pretty typical occurrence in racing. Rather than worrying about his own safety or otherwise panicking, he remembers distinctly thinking about one thing: money.

"As the crash is happening, I kid you not, you're thinking, 'How much is this going to cost,' as the crash is happening," he said. "When I crashed in down in Dillon, South Carolina last year, you know, I kid you not, I'm staring the wall in the face, going right towards it; there's nothing I can do. And it happens in milliseconds, but I'm telling you, as I was heading for the wall, I was thinking, 'This isn't going to be cheap.' And it wasn't. It cost us a nice chunk of change."

This time around, "anything catastrophic will kill the season," said Gantt.

It's a risk Beckman, Gantt and company are willing to take though as it all comes down to doing what makes them feel alive.

"We're definitely not going to get rich off this. We like the sport and it's something we want to do," said Gantt.