West Virginia Motor Speedway
Vintage RTJ lands on DTWC's pole position
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Ricky Thornton Jr. (20rt) battles at WVMS. (Clifford Dove)
MINERAL WELLS, W.Va. (Oct. 17) — The dominant, ultra-confident Ricky Thornton Jr. that the Dirt Late Model world has been waiting all season to see in all his glory is back.
Saturday’s preliminary program for Carl Short’s 46th annual ARP Dirt Track World Championship at West Virginia Motor Speedway provided the indelible evidence. From a hard-driving comeback heat-race win to a restart explosion in the first 25-lap semifeature that carried him from fifth to first in flash and on to a $5,000 victory, Thornton demonstrated that, after a sometimes frustrating, uneven campaign, he’s once again the master of his full-fender domain.
“I mean, anything in racing is 90 percent mental,” Thornton said while standing in street clothes outside his Koehler Motorsports team’s trailer at the conclusion of the chilly autumn night. “I’m not afraid now to stick my car in places where most of the year I wouldn’t do it because of being afraid I’m going to run the guy over or get in a wreck or whatever it might be. Now I feel like our car’s back good enough that I can do what I need to.”
And as Thornton, 36, of Chandler, Ariz., noted, his heat-race triumph showed immediately just how comfortable he is with the new Longhorn Chassis he debuted in grand fashion one week ago with a $65,000 sweep of the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series-sanctioned Clash on the Wabash at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio. He was outgunned for the lead at the start of WVMS’s fourth heat by Garrett Smith of Eatonton, Ga., but roared back within a matter of laps to seize command with a powerful outside charge around the third-mile oval.
Thornton seemed to take himself to another level — that clear superstar level that resides inside him — as he sailed through the bullring’s corners to overtake Smith. He was clearly on the gas, digging hard, yet still in control.
Vintage RTJ.
“I didn’t see the last (four) heats (of the night’s eight qualifiers), but in the first four heats, only one guy won off the pole, so I knew I was kind of at a disadvantage,” Thornton said. “And I didn’t get a good start. (Smith) got out, and then I screwed up in turns three and four the first lap and let him get all the way back in front of me and kind of take off. I was like, ‘I may have just gave this thing away.’
“So I was like, ‘Well, I know I’m not gonna pass him around the bottom,’ so I said, ‘Screw it,’ and moved up (the track). There was a couple guys in the heat before me I was watching, (Kyle) Bronson and (Ryan) Montgomery, they got out there, and Montgomery made a ton of ground and got towards the front, so I’m like, ‘If I do get in second, I’m gonna try it.’
“But,” he added, “I knew I had to get super-aggressive.”
That wasn’t a problem for Thornton, who, operating at the full magnitude of his abilities, was “able to get to Garrett and then drive around him.”
“Any other time earlier this year I would have ran second and been like, ‘All right, cool,’” Thornton said. “But tonight, I was be able to see the (video) board off four and I was like, ‘All right, I got a little bit of a gap (on third place). I can try something for a lap and, if it don’t work, get back in line.’ And it ended up working.”
Saturday happened to be the first time Thornton has tackled the new, shorter WVMS layout since track owner Mike Hurley oversaw the reconfiguring of the former 5/8-mile track for the 2025 season, but he took to it with easygoing aplomb.
“These type of places, they get so dirty but grippy,” Thornton said. “And it kind of reminds me of, like, a few other places we go to, like Muskingum (County Speedway in Zanesville, Ohio) and places like that where just because it’s dirty doesn’t mean you’re automatically in a four-wheel slide.
“It’s like being out in the sand dune. It’s almost like you just got to have wheel-spin through it. I don’t know if that’s what I love about sprint cars, because that’s how you drive a sprint car. Like you just drive across the crumbs and run wide open.
“The way it’s shaped here, (turns) three and four, you can really sail it in there (on the top). One and two, there’s a tight entry and a long exit, and three and four is the opposite. Like, you almost slide yourself in three and four.
“It worked out for us,” he continued. “And I think being able to do that (in the heat) let me manage the first part of the feature that much better.”
Starting third in the split-field 25-lapper, Thornton actually fell to fifth in the early circuits. But that was partly by design, and, as things usually go when a vastly talented driver is feeling it, his plan came to fruition.
“Originally I wanted to kind of run hard because I thought a lot of guys would put hard tires on,” Thornton said. “Well, then all of us had soft tires on, so I was like, ‘All right, I’m gonna let them take off hard, and then if we get a restart, eight, nine laps in, try to pounce right away.’
Pound Thornton did, following a lap-six restart. In a matter of four laps he blasted past Drake Troutman, Benji Hicks, Devin Moran and, finally, race-long pacesetter Tyler Carpenter to put himself in front for good on lap 10.
“We get that restart, and I’m like, ‘All right, Devin’s definitely going to the top. Benji’s on the bottom, and Benji’s gonna last two, three laps around the bottom and then I know he’s going back to the top,’ ” Thornton said. “And it worked out that way, and after that I just had to methodically figure out how I needed to run the bottom to be able to make speed down the straightaway. And once I’d done that, then I was able to get by Dev, get Benji, then get by Tyler. It doesn’t always work out like, but when it does, it makes it a little more special.”
Drivers whom Thornton vanquished were left in awe of the winner’s powers.
“Yeah, he was really good,” said Dresden, Ohio’s Moran, who settled for a third-place finish. “I really felt like I was running Tyler down, just pacing myself a little bit, and I found that top and I thought I was going to get him, and then we got messed up there and Ricky went by and we just never had a chance to get back to him.
“I think he was just really good in general. And I started slicing and dicing a little bit and Ricky went by us both and it was game over.”
Hicks, a regional racer from Mount Airy, N.C., who ran in the top-five until a lap-13 spin following contact with Carpenter put him to the rear, hailed Thornton’s race craft.
“It’s one of those transitions where he’s got a million laps, and so he’s like seeing how fast the tracks change,” said Hicks, who finished 14th. “And so, obviously, he seen something there (on the restart), felt something there under that caution, that I really wasn’t even looking for.
“I was really thinking, OK, well, the top’s still going to be good. I’m just going to go up here and stay. And then he just circled right around that bottom and kind of skated to the center and then was able to drive straight off and make the straight away that much longer, just drag race down to the other end.
“But, I mean, he was good, obviously,” he added. “He’s been good. I mean, he just swept the weekend last weekend at Eldora so he’s been fast.”
Thornton’s performance was made even more impressive by the fact that his machine quite right because of a blemish of his own doing.
“I ran into an infield tire, knocked the nose down, and that was before I got to the lead,” Thornton said. “I was actually in third and I was watching Devin and Tyler battle it out and then I smoked the infield tire, the second tire in turn one.
“It affected the steering on entry if I’d try to be straight. Like I almost had it enter sideways and just not let the left-front get down, so that’s one benefit of the way I run my car with the left-front up a little bit, where like a normal car, you wouldn’t be able to steer very good. I don’t know if it made me drive a little more aggressive, too, just to make sure I didn’t get in and get a push, but it shows how good our car is.”
Thornton had one other regret from his winning run, albeit one out of his control because four caution flags flew over the final 12 circuits.
“I never got to lapped cars to see how I was gonna be in dirty air,” Thornton said. “Like, at the start of the race, it was dirty air, but it’s different just because the track, from sitting, gets way more dirty than when you’re racing behind lapped cars halfway through the race.
“Never got to do that, but every restart we kind of just slowly worked our way out.”
Which, of course, bodes well for Thornton in Sunday’s $100,000-to-win, which he’ll start from the pole position as he seeks to continue his late-season hot streak and add another DTWC victory to his checkered flag in 2021 at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park.
