Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Motor Speedway

Second RTJ stint over, Burroughs's next task

October 4, 2026, 4:13 pm

By Kyle McFadden

DirtonDirt staff reporter

Anthony Burroughs (heathlawsonphotos.com)

IMPERIAL, Pa. (Oct. 3) — Few in the Dirt Late Model pit area hold more staunchly to their word and agreements than Anthony Burroughs.

So when news broke last week that his latest tenure with Ricky Thornton Jr. at Koehler Motorsports would end with three race weekends remaining on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series schedule, it caught many by surprise — Burroughs included.

“You never want to start something and not finish it,” Burroughs told DirtonDirt prior to Saturday’s 38th annual Pittsburgher at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway, where he began his latest head-wrench tenure with Kyle Bronson. “I wanted to get through the Lucas (Oil) season, but you can’t stop the rumors. I’m also a realistic person, and I’m never going to lie and mislead anybody.”

The 52-year-old Muscle Shoals, Ala., native is candid in saying seven victories and a fourth-place Lucas Oil standing — a distant 495 points out of first following last Saturday’s Jackson 100 at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway — isn’t what he and Thornton reunited for last December after the Chandler, Ariz., superstar ripped off 56 victories from August 2021-July 2024 with Burroughs at SSI Motorsports.

“I think we’re all disappointed that we couldn’t take off and win 40 races again,” Burroughs said. “But that’s really hard to do. … People forget. They just forget how hard it is to do that.”

So naturally, Burroughs began to wonder, as remarkable as his and Thornton’s chemistry and record together have been, whether it might be best for the two to go their separate ways. And in today’s social-media landscape, where the slightest inkling of a potential move can quickly catch fire, those thoughts didn’t remain private for long.

“As the rumors got out, I knew sooner or later Ricky and I were going to talk about the rumors,” Burroughs said. “And we did. I was more than ready to get prepared for it, and I think he was, too. It’s just business, man.”

Indeed, Burroughs has a well-established knack for drawing the line between personal matters and strictly business decisions. He emphasizes that, although his personal relationships with Thornton and his now-former Koehler team remain in good standing, racing still comes down to performance. If the results aren't satisfactory, something will inevitably change.

“Me and Ricky talked before we left here on Monday. It’s 100 percent business. He gets it. I get it. Nobody’s mad,” Burroughs said. "Like I said, it’s really over with. I’m just focused on finishing out (2026 with Bronson) strong, getting settled in and building our program.

“A lot of people read me wrong because I’m all business all the time,” Burroughs added. “We put our heart and soul into this. We work daylight to dark. It’s not always enough, but you’ve got to be happy doing what you’re doing and you’ve got to love what you’re doing. Fortunately for me, I never dread getting up and going to work.

“I’m very fortunate, very blessed. Like I said, I’m just really excited to get started and see what we can do.”

Burroughs covered more than 1,600 miles last week — going from Brownstown to Koehler’s Mount Airy, N.C., shop, to what’ll be his new South Georgia home with Bronson’s team, to Pittsburgh.

After Tuesday’s announcement that Burroughs and the Koehler team would part ways, that following morning, he picked up a U-Haul trailer and was preparing for another move, this time from North Carolina to Georgia to begin working with the 36-year-old Bronson. He arrived around midnight Wednesday, unloaded his belongings into what he says his new house “that isn’t quite finished” and quickly turned his attention toward Saturday’s Pittsburgher.

“There’s no off time,” Burroughs said. “You stay at home, you get behind. I knew we needed to get down there and get started. … It sucks to move again. It sucks to change jobs again, but it’s just the nature of the sport.”

Landing with Bronson — a driver who hasn’t won since last August’s Baltes Classic semifeature at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, and is winless at the national-tour level since June 2023’s World of Outlaws Late Model Series photo finish at Tri-City Speedway in Granite City, Ill. — might seem an unexpected move for Burroughs.

But Bronson’s winless drought, coupled with flashes of excellence — like leading 38 laps at the North-South 100 and 22 at the Jackson 100 — presents Burroughs with an opportunity to help steer the eight-time national series winner back onto a promising path, much like the challenge he embraced upon joining SSI in 2021.

“It’s kind of like when I first went to SSI. This program is down,” Burroughs said. “He wants to fix it, and that’s what we’re going to try to do. We’re going to try to build a really nice program with Kyle and see if we can get him going.

“We’ve been friends for many years. When he got his Longhorns, I tried to help him a little bit when he was running Outlaws. Like I said, we’ve just been friends,” Burroughs continued. “His car owners have always told me that if I ever needed anything, or they would like to do something with me before I’m done.

“We just felt like, with everything that was available for me, this was where I wanted to be. It kind of fits me.”

Burroughs’s extensive crew-chiefing résumé includes Jared Landers (2012), Earl Pearson Jr. (2013 and July 2020-August 2021), Steve Francis (2015), Darrell Lanigan (2016), Don O’Neal (2017-18), Josh Richards (2019), Brian Shirley (January 2020-July 2020), Hudson O’Neal (July 2024-December 2024) and Brandon Overton (December 2024-November 2025).

His 2015-19 seasons were spent with Clint Bowyer Racing, with his ’19 stint alongside Richards marking the last time he worked with Rocket Chassis, which Bronson’s team campaigns.

For Bronson, he’s never worked alongside an established head wrench like Burroughs, but he’s long sought to secure someone of that caliber.

“My car owner has been really wanting to help me out with that my whole career. It just finally worked out, I guess, at the right time,” Bronson said. “Really, it’s always just been me and a couple buddies. We just kind of winged it, really.”

Currently 12th in Lucas Oil points, Bronson is enduring his least productive national touring season since first hitting the road in 2018. After finishing 13th in the standings that year, he improved to ninth, seventh, sixth, fourth and fourth in his next five full-time campaigns, the latter two coming with the World of Outlaws in 2023 and ’24.

“We ain’t been hitting on all eight all year long, I’ve felt like. I’m very disappointed in my performance all year,” Bronson said. “Really, like I said, I’ve got to get my ass in gear. We’ve got to get our team in gear. I think we’ve got the people around us now to do that.

“With Burroughs, Donnie (Birdwell) and Aaron (Mitchell), all three work their ass off. I think I’ve got the best team I’ve ever had. I’m just looking forward to getting racing with these guys.”

What are the expectations now for Bronson and Burroughs? For Bronson, there’s really only one acceptable outcome.

“Really, it’s all about winning,” Bronson said. “We’ve got a lot of races left still. We live in the South, so there are a lot more races for us.”

And while leading a combined 60 laps between the North-South 100 and Jackson 100 might suggest Bronson is already making progress, he doesn’t put much stock in those performances after fading to 10th and 16th in the respective 100-lappers.

“You’ve got to finish the deal,” Bronson said. “It’s like taking a girl to the movies and then she’s going home afterwards. That just don’t work for me.”

He didn’t stop there.

“We’ve been getting our ass kicked for a couple years here,” Bronson said. “So if we can’t get our ass going, I guess we’re going to have to put our golf clothes on and go figure out how to play golf or something.

“Really, we just need to get our stuff in gear and hopefully knock a couple wins off and head into (January’s start of Georgia-Florida) Speedweeks strong, because I feel like we’ll be pretty good at Speedweeks.”

Burroughs plans to examine every nut and bolt of Bronson’s program — from the car’s inner workings to how tools and equipment are organized in the trailer and shop — with the goal of rebuilding the team’s foundation heading into 2027.

“We’ve just got to get our approach. We’re pretty much going to back up. We’re going to finish the year, but we’re going to back up and rebuild,” Burroughs said. “We’re going to check the box on everything, from everything that’s coming out of that pit box, coming out of this trailer. We’re just going to start over.

“I had all the shocks out in there today, and there was like a tornado coming over there. We’ll see. But we’ll get better. Like I say, we’re just building. I’m really pumped up for what we’re going to build and confident in where it’s going to go.

“Listen, we know Kyle Bronson can drive a race car. Kyle has always had to kind of be his own crew chief. He’s had to run a team. Now he’s going to be able to concentrate on being a race car driver, and I’m going to take all that off of him. That’s the part I enjoy. I want the responsibility.”

As he closes his tenure at Koehler, Burroughs believes Thornton will continue to excel without him.

“He’s good enough, he can win with his next team,” Burroughs said. “He’s a smart fellow. He knows his way around a race car. It’s like I told him when I told him my decision and the reason why: Ricky doesn’t need a crew chief. He just needs a mechanic because he’s one of the better crew chiefs in the pit area. He’ll be fine. I’m going to be fine. We’re all fine.”

Despite their struggles this season, Thornton delivered one of the most consistent months of his Dirt Late Model career in September. Though he went winless, his 2.5 average finish across six features ranks fourth among career months in which he started at least three features.

That stretch included runner-up finishes in his Friday World 100 prelim and the finale, along with a third-place finish in the Jackson 100.

“We got it rolling pretty decent there,” Burroughs said. “From Shelby County on, (when they won July 18’s Silver Dollar Nationals), we kind of got our program turned around. And guess what we did differently? Nothing. We didn’t do nothing. It’s just racing. We had some bad luck or we’d have won a couple more. But it’s just the way the sport is.

“There are no hard feelings with me and Ricky. I wish those guys all the best, and I know he does, too. Me and Ricky have become really good friends, and we’ll remain friends for the rest of our lives.

“I’m grateful for the time we had there and just really looking forward to building something with these guys and getting this car in victory lane. And I know we can.”

Burroughs doesn’t see the Bronson gig as just another landing spot. He believes it’s somewhere he can settle in for the foreseeable future — and perhaps longer.

“Hopefully we found us a home. We’ll do these guys a good job and they’ll be happy with us. They’re really good people,” Burroughs said. “I just feel confident. I think that’s the best way to put it. I really feel comfortable, and I haven’t really felt comfortable in a long time. So we’ll see what we’ve got.”