The story's narrator, a traffic investigator, has just attended the scene of a serious car accident, where the nineteen year old driver, Tom Robinson, drove over an embankment rolling his car. He knows the accident was due to Tom's excessive speeding, for which he was known. The narrator wants to understand what led to Tom's attitude toward his reckless driving. He interviews Tom's friends and family to find out. In doing so, he finds that Tom is basically a good kid, to whom his car was everything. A few minor disappointments in his life were probably compensated for by the adoration he received from friends and and his younger brother for what they saw as his driving acumen, most notably getting from point A to point B ahead of everyone else in one piece. Despite his father's desire for Tom to obey all the traffic rules, Tom was also modeling his father's own reckless driving behavior.