In the first one, Timmy and his father were dove shooting on August 19, 2004. That’s when Timmy shot two of his toes off his right foot. “He got a bird, then when he went to put his gun on safety, he accidentally hit the trigger instead, and the gun went off, ka-boom!” Mike says. “It didn’t look that bad when we looked at it. I thought it might have missed his toes. We didn’t even pull the shoe off. We went to the emergency room and when they pulled the shoe off, it had blown one of them slap-off. The other was just there.” That was the week before the Million Dollar Race in Memphis.

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“The first thing he said out of the hospital was, ‘Daddy, what are we gonna do about this Million Dollar race?’ We had two entries into it. We just didn’t get to go. That’s all he was worried about, George Howard’s Million Dollar Race,” Mike says. Tim didn’t race for a month and a half. Then he got right back in the Vega. People started calling him “Two Toes Timmy,” so for laughs he put that name on his own Danny Nelson dragster.

Then came the second accident, January 29, 2005. Timmy was at friend Ricky Taylor’s shop near Montgomery, welding on a transmission case that was sitting on top of a 55-gallon drum that had some holes knocked in it to let transmission fluid drain in it. Undoubtedly, at some time or another, some kind of explosive fluid had gotten in there, with accompanying fumes. As soon as he began welding, ka-boom! The sparks blew the drum up and blew the transmission case directly into his face, and the protective welding shield cut his face off. Literally. That one, Mike says, “like to have got him.”

When the family (Mike was divorced from Timmy’s mother when Timmy was three) got to the hospital, Mike thought they had lost him, because they wouldn’t let them see him. In the small town where the Smiths live, the ambulance got escorted by two patrol cars. They first brought him from Taylor’s shop to Randolph County Medical Center, stabilized him enough to take him by life-flight to a hospital in Columbus, Georgia, and then on to Birmingham and the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s burn trauma center. In surgery, doctors operated on him for seven hours. From Sunday morning to Wednesday night, he was in the ICU unit. Timmy stayed there for six days then came home.

They wouldn’t let him see him initially, Mike says, “but when I saw the pictures later, there was only a cavity where his nose was. It took his whole face and laid it over to the side. They had to get a piece of bone material off the side of his skull to make a new nose bone, then reconstruct his face over it. It also messed up his right eye. He can’t open it up yet.” There is more plastic surgery scheduled. The blast cut the muscle into the eye lid, and the doctor says that it will take awhile for the muscle to grow back. If it doesn’t, Tim will go to an eye lid specialist later this year.

Even with this horrible accident, Timmy was worried about his racing. “He had the breathing machine on, so he had to write us messages. The first thing he wrote, he wanted some water. The second thing was, ‘When can I drive again?’ That boy loves it. He lives it,” Mike says.