All-Terrain Vehicles have never had the chance to compete at the Daytona International Speedway during Daytona Bike Week, but they will this year in The FLY Racing ATV Supercross on Tuesday, and Suffolk’s Kittrell Eberwine IV will be one of the participants.

It will be biggest event yet for the 16-year-old Eberwine, who has been racing for more than a decade.

“I got a four-wheeler for my fourth birthday,” he said.

His father, Kittrell Eberwine III, said that just over a month after receiving the vehicle, his son became a racer.

“We’ve had some friends, their kids were doing it, and that’s kind of what got him started,” the elder Eberwine said.

His son said these friends did not push him to get into the sport.

“They decided we could go with them and try it out, if we liked it, do it, and we liked it, and then they later on quit and stopped, and we just kept going, and then it came into this,” the younger Eberwine said.

The “this” he was referring to is a busy racing career, and it is a hugely successful one, at that. Eberwine won his first Virginia state championship at the age of 6, and he was claiming his eighth by the time he was 15.

“Nobody else that we can find has won eight state championships,” his father said.

Eberwine has also won a Maryland state championship and a myriad of other titles, as well as participated in more than a dozen national events, which actually feature international racers from places like the United Kingdom, Australia and France.

The Eberwines are clear evidence that being an ATV racer is a lifestyle.

“There’s been some years that we’ve been on the road 43 weekends,” the elder Eberwine said, noting that they now cover those miles in a 71-foot rig. “It’s longer than a tractor-trailer between all the race stuff we carry.”

As his son has gotten older, the speeds in the sport become faster and the risks greater.

He said that when Kittrell first started, “I was nervous, yeah, but at 4 years old, he’s not going but so fast. I’m a whole lot more nervous now. I literally get nauseated to my stomach every time he goes to the starting line. Once he takes off, I’m usually OK, but it’s not good for the heart, nor the stomach.”

When his son was 4 and driving a vehicle with a 50 cubic centimeter engine, Eberwine only went about 20 to 25 miles per hour. Now, driving a bike with the largest possible engine, 450cc, speeds in races vary from 80 to 115 miles per hour.

Tracks are typically two to three miles long, forming a loop, but winding with bumps and hills.

“It’s going uphill, downhill, sometimes they have jumps going downhill, turns on sides of hills,” the younger Eberwine said.

Races normally feature three or four laps around the track and are generally over in 10 to 15 minutes.

Though the sport is dangerous, Eberwine avoided significant crashes and serious injury for nearly 10 years to start his career. Since then, he has broken his collar bone in three places when he was 13 and broke his ankle and tore some ligaments when he was 15.

But the sport’s appeal to the younger Eberwine is simple.

“It’s all on me, all the pressure’s on me to do it, and it’s like, I can win something really huge by myself, I can accomplish something that big by myself, and it’s so much fun to do it, anyway,” he said.