The Dirt Track at Charlotte
RTJ’s tire gamble fuels seventh straight victory
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Ricky Thornton Jr. en route to victory. (joshjamesphotos.com)
CONCORD, N.C. (Nov. 5) — Ricky Thornton Jr. thought he still could have won Thursday’s 35-lap Dave Smith Motors World Finals opener at The Dirt Track at Charlotte without a mid-race red flag for rain giving him an opportunity to take a tire-change gamble.
“I was really good,” he said, asserting his satisfaction with his Koehler Motorsports Longhorn Chassis.
But Thornton’s explosion from fifth to first in the span of two circuits following the feature’s resumption after a 35-minute delay was about more than just the softer tires on his car. The 36-year-old superstar from Chandler, Ariz., still had to make the daring move on the lap-17 restart that vaulted him by everyone in front of him, including race-long pacesetter Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga.
And right now, of course, Thornton is operating on an elite level that allowed him to turn a break into a $15,000 World of Outlaws Late Model Series victory that extended his incredible autumn win streak to seven in a row.
“Confidence is high, and we probably wouldn’t have drove into one as hard as I did” without that self-assuredness, Thornton said. “I never lifted off the throttle on the restart, where typically you kind of slow down and just try not to put yourself in a bad position.”
That was Ricky Thornton Jr. doing Ricky Thornton Jr. things, which he seems to be doing a lot of these days amid an amazing streak that has brought him $365,000 in the span of a month.
Thornton started 12th in the first of three World Finals A-mains after feeling that he “let the team down” with a runner-up finish in his heat race. He hustled up to fifth place, however, by the time a brief rain shower slickened the 4/10-mile oval on lap 17, sending the field to the pit area to wait for the precipitation to end and the track to be reclaimed.
WoO rules permit teams to make whatever changes they desire to their cars during red-flag situations like Thursday’s, but Thornton and his Justin Tharp-led crew didn’t initially realize they could go to work on their machine.
“That was the crazy part for us — we didn’t know we were allowed to do anything, so we didn’t do nothing until they blew the (10-minute) horn to go to staging,” Thornton said. “We asked (officials), ‘Well, everyone else is changing tires, doing this, doing that,’ and then they said you can do whatever you want.”
So while Thornton and his crew “didn’t tune anything,” they added five gallons of fuel and made a quick and ultimately savvy change of all four tires. While virtually every team in the race changed tires, the typical call was to replace the hard 4-compound right-rear tire and one or more of the softer 3-compound tires used on the other corners at the start of the race. Thornton’s bunch went outside the box, opting to go softer all the way around by switching to a 3-compound right-rear and 2-compound Hoosiers on the other corners.
Thornton was sly in referring to his tire-compound change afterward. He didn’t throw out any specific compound numbers after the race.
“I’m not positive what the guys put on,” Thornton said. “They changed tires. I just told them put on whatever they thought.”
All of Thornton’s competitors knew what he had put on his car once the race was over. In fact, many realized it as soon as the feature restarted. When Thornton stuck to the bottom of the track and glided by Overton to take the lead on lap 19, Overton said he immediately told himself, “Well, there’s the guy who put on a 3 and 2’s.”
As much as those softer tires helped Thornton glue himself to the inside on a track surface that changed due to the rain, though, he still had to negotiate his way past four very formidable rivals ahead of him in Overton, Chris Ferguson of Mount Holly, N.C., Nick Hoffman of Mooresville, N.C., and Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill. He did it with the aplomb of a driver on a superhuman heater.
“Really, I didn’t know if I wanted to go to the top or go to the bottom. My restart dictated that,” Thornton said. “If I was able to clear Bobby enough where I felt like I was able to turn across and go to the bottom, that was my game plan. If not, my plan was to go all the way to the top to the curb.
“I ended up clearing Bobby and those (other) guys kind of left the middle to the bottom open, so I just turned (entering turn one) and they all got in and kind of shoved across and I was able to drive straight so it worked out perfect for me. I was able to get a really good start and get second there, and then I felt like I was able to stay on top of Brandon that next lap and I’m like, ‘Alright, if I can stay with him and he doesn’t completely block the slide job, like, I got to slide him and try to just take off,’ and I was able to do that.”
Thornton quickly put nearly a half-straightaway on Overton and held on from there. His fellow Lucas Oil Series regular cut the gap in the closing laps as the track dried out, but Thornton had enough of an edge to hold on.
“I really didn’t know where I needed to be the last four or five laps,” Thornton said. “Obviously watching lapped cars and stuff, you’re trying to gauge and slow yourself down that way you don’t get to the lapped cars again but run fast enough where he don’t catch you at the same time, so it worked out for us.”
Can Thornton roll on Friday (another $15,000-to-win race) and Saturday ($25,000 top prize) and become the first driver to sweep all three World Finals features since the event expanded into a tripleheader in 2022? He knows his streak, which includes two-race sweeps of October weekends at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, West Virginia Motor Speedway in Mineral Wells and Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park, can’t go on forever, but he believes he has a car capable of making Charlotte history.
Thornton’s Longhorn Chassis is, after all, undefeated since he debuted it last month at Eldora’s Clash on the Wabash.
He’s come close to World Finals sweeps, winning the final two nights in 2023 (after an 11th-place finish in the opener) and following up a win in 2024’s Thursday show with finishes of fourth and second.
“We’ll see,” Thornton said when asked about a potential World Finals sweep. “I start third again (Friday) in my heat race. If the racetrack’s like it was tonight … I feel like I was good enough to at worst run fifth. Me and Bobby were really good coming from the sixth row together, and I felt like we were good enough to run second or third for sure and it was just gonna be a matter of if we had enough time to get to Brandon and try to race Brandon.
“Me and (third-place finisher) Bobby (Pierce) were good. Where we were good, other people weren’t good. We could run wherever we wanted on the racetrack and make speed where a lot of guys were married to the top. We could track a guy down, turn under him and drive by him, and then get back in line and catch the next guy. We could get to them, pass them, and keep going. Hopefully we can have that the rest of the weekend.
“Anytime you can come here and you can run hard but not run out of control and you have speed, that’s when you know you got a really good race car. So that’s how I felt tonight.”
