MT. VERNON — Daniel Heck winds his way into his father’s office Friday afternoon and silently presents a handful of shredded metal pieces he’s pulled from the motor of his race car.

Rick Heck eyes the pile of parts over a plate of fried catfish.

“Sure you didn’t lose a valve?” Rick asks.

Daniel doesn’t answer as he hurries back to the shop. As he leans over the motor, the 21-year-old mumbles, “Oh, God.”

But by the next day, the white crate late model with a purple number 58 is good as new as Daniel and his brother Aaron Heck, 20, tear around the quarter-mile dirt track at Mt. Vernon Raceway.

Rick Heck has owned the Mt. Vernon Raceway since 1999, but has loved watching racing since he was 5 years-old and is glad to lend support to his sons as they follow in his footsteps.

Most Saturday nights, four classes of cars hit the dirt at the raceway. United Midwestern Promoters four-cylinder “hornet cars,” barely more than stripped-down passenger cars, kick pebble-sized bits of dirt into the first few rows of the stands. UMP crate late models look more like stock cars, their lightweight forms crowded with holographic number stickers and sponsor information. UMP modifieds are louder and faster than the first two classes and also get the crowd dirtier. The fourth class, the UMP sportsman class, is for rear wheel drive, hard top cars or trucks.

“We have one race a week on Saturday nights,” Rick says. “We sometimes have special races Thursdays, and if there’s a race then, there’s no race Saturday. The specials are usually sprint cars or UMP super leg models.”

Rick, also the proprietor of Rick’s Towing, has little time for nonsense. The office of his towing business  has a sign plastered on the door: “This isn’t the drivers’ lounge, so stay out!”

Rick applies the same pragmatism to beginning a career or hobby in dirt track racing.

“Build you a car and go race,” he advises.

His career began in 1972 at dirt tracks in Benton, Centralia and Marion that have since gone by the wayside — similarly, his sons started racing at the early ages of 12 and 13 years-old.

Aaron says he first climbed behind the wheel of a four-cylinder racer because he wanted to be like his dad.

“Hopefully, one day I’ll race a full-blown late model, which has a bigger motor than what we got, and be good at it,” he says.

Four generations of Hecks share a love for the race track — Daniel’s son, Damon, 3, likes to point out his daddy’s race cars, and Kathleen Heck, Rick’s mother, never misses a race.

“I love the races, especially when my little grandsons are in them,” she says, perching on a picnic table planted near the first turn. “I missed their first two or three races, because I was under the weather, but I ain’t missed a race since then.”

Kathleen shows she can cheer with the best of fans, hooting and clapping as drivers in heat races Saturday spin their tail ends around the banked track.

“They’re gonna be fantastic racers,” she yells over the growl of the engines, brushing a clod of dirt out of her white perm.

The Heck boys are already doing fairly well, it seems, since Rick says Daniel is eighth and Aaron is eleventh in the UMP national standings —results from more than 100 race tracks in the U.S. and Canada.

Rick says the race track is doing nearly as well as his boys.

“This year’s been one of our best years since we’ve owned it,” he says. “With the economy being bad, we weren’t sure what to look for, but it’s been a pretty decent year.”

As long as the crowds keep up and drivers keep showing up, Rick says, the races should continue into mid-October.

“The fans get a little better each week,” he says.

Readying the sloped track takes nearly as much time as it does for drivers to tune up their cars before a race.

Rick says it’s a 30-hour-a-week, two-man job to beat the dirt into submission.

A variety of vehicles circle the track interminably before the races begin — a beat-up tanker sprays water onto the dirt, then a couple of tractors scramble for traction as they try to mash the track into a smooth surface, kicking up a wave of dirt clods in their wake. Four or five Rick’s Towing trucks cycle around as well, their wheels ostensibly leveling the dirt.

Though he admits there were more drivers coming to the raceway 10 years ago when he bought the track, Rick says about a hundred cars chew the dirt each Saturday despite the dragging economy.

Drivers come from Indiana, Missouri and Kentucky, as well as from all over Southern Illinois to roll into the fenced track.

“It’s one of the fastest quarter-mile tracks in Illinois,” Rick boasts. “The racing there’s been really good all year.”