Central Arizona Raceway
Thornton impressive in home-state USAC shows
Ricky Thornton Jr. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
CASA GRANDE, Ariz. (Oct. 25) — There was a big event in Ricky Thornton Jr.’s home state of Arizona and his schedule was clear. It goes without saying that he’d want to run it — even though it wasn’t for Dirt Late Models.
That’s just the mentality of the race-crazy Thornton, who has a well known desire to drive anything, at anytime. So with a non-wing sprint car ride secured for last weekend’s USAC Western World Championships at Central Arizona Raceway, he happily hopped a flight to spend a few nights turning laps at a track that sits roughly 45 minutes south of his native Chandler, Ariz.
Thornton’s results behind the wheel of an unfamiliar vehicle? Better than even the confident 35-year-old expected as he tallied a pair of top-fives, finishing fourth in Friday’s preliminary and fifth in Saturday’s $35,000-to-win finale.
“The guys (with the Petty Performance team) were pretty confident coming into this week,” said Thornton, who resides in Indianola, Iowa, just outside Des Moines. “I really … my goal was just to make the main both nights. So to have a fourth and a fifth is pretty special.”
Thornton’s sublime versatility was on full display in the two-day event. The 2025 runner-up in the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series championship race had driven a wingless sprint car just once before he went out for practice laps on Thursday, but that was nearly a decade ago and not in a USAC national show.
“I ran a non-wing car one time in 2017 or so, but it was like a spec 360,” Thornton said. “It wasn’t a 410 (engine). It wasn’t these caliber of (USAC) guys either, so it just really shows how good this whole team is.”
That was a modest downplaying of his performance by Thornton, who after Saturday’s fifth-place finish remarked that he “felt like I probably let my guys down a little bit tonight.” He was disappointed that he gave up a fourth-place finish in the 35-lap feature on the last circuit “coming off turn four essentially,” but no one on his team, nor anyone else watching, could have possibly considered his weekend work anything but superb.
While the competitor in Thornton believed he should have done better, he looked like he belonged out there racing with the best drivers in the USAC ranks. He even won a Friday heat race and his results over the two days earned him recognition as the 2025 Western World Rookie of the Year plus plus an extra $1,500 as the Team AZ-Petty-Rossi “Whiz Kid” award winner.
Thornton was competitive on two surfaces as well, proving his ability to adapt.
“(Friday) night it was super slick,” Thornton said. “They never really had to farm it right before our feature. They farmed it before the B-mains and then just kind of let it go from there and it rubbered towards the end.
“So they were worried about that for tonight, so they did a full farm for the feature and the top just never really slowed down. It wasn’t really a big curb, but you could make so much momentum. There towards the end they said R.J. (Johnson) was running on the bottom (charging from 23rd to finish ninth) and (fourth-place finisher) Brady (Bacon) moved out and started gaining ground too, so I feel like tonight had so much more speed where last night didn’t.
“I feel like we were probably running 16-, 17-second laps, where last night we were running 19,” he continued. “So just way different, but at the same time I feel like (Petty Performance’s) stuff’s good enough where even though I was probably making way too many mistakes, we were still competitive.”
Thornton pointed out that the non-wing sprint car and his Dirt Late Model “got pretty much the same motor, but other than that” they’re vastly different machines in weight and the way they’re driven.
“Just the hard part is, once you wheelspin in a sprint car, it’s hard to regain (speed), where I feel like the Late Model you can regain it and get going again,” Thornton said. “So I got to kind of learn that right away, and then just turning off in the corner, you use the right-rear in these where the Late Model you use the right front. Those couple of little things I had to learn.”
The experience Thornton gained at Central Arizona early in his racing career — mostly in open-wheel modifieds — wasn’t really a benefit.
“Obviously, I have a million laps here, but the track configuration is so different now where I feel like the laps I had aren’t good anymore,” Thornton said. “So I just had to kind of learn the racetrack, which everyone here had to learn the racetrack.”
Those laps should come in handy for Thornton when he returns to Central Arizona Raceway after the holidays to run his Koehler Motorsports Dirt Late Model in Jan. 10-18’s Rio Grande Waste Services Wild West Shootout, which returns to Thornton’s home state after a four-year stint at Vado (N.M.) Speedway Park. He hasn’t entered the six-race miniseries since 2021, the event’s final year at the since-closed Arizona Speedway in Queen Creek.
Thornton mused that the 3/8-mile oval will offer a unique challenge to Dirt Late Model competitors.
“Just the track layout is so weird,” said Thornton, who owns a single career win in Wild West Shootout action (2021’s second race). “The back straightaway is perfectly straight, and the front straightaway is like a D almost, so you just kind of run it different. You never really get straight down the front straightaway, because if you do, then you’re in the wrong spot to get in turn one.
“I know they say they’re going to work on it a little bit, just try to make it a little bit wider for the Late Models and stuff like that. They didn’t know exactly what they were going to have (last weekend). They had a High Limit (410 Sprint Car Series) race earlier this year, but it was so long ago they’ve changed stuff and all that. I mean they’ve made so many improvements here compared to how it used to be, it’s almost unrecognizable, so I think they’re definitely going in the right direction.”
The Wild West Shootout isn’t yet on Thornton’s radar, though, because he still has more racing — and division-jumping — to do this season. He has three more Dirt Late Model weekends remaining, starting with Nov. 5-8’s World Finals at The Dirt Track at Charlotte in Concord, N.C., and continuing with Nov. 14-15’s FloRacing Night in America Peach State Classic at Senoia (Ga.) Raceway and Dec. 4-6’s Gateway Dirt Nationals at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Mo.
And during the World Finals, Thornton will pull double-duty with plans to drive the Indianapolis Race Parts winged 410 sprint in the NOS Energy World of Outlaws Sprint Car portion of the program. It will be the second straight year he'll run sprint at Charlotte — last year he failed to qualify for all three features — and mark the eighth different division he’s competed in this season along with a Dirt Late Model, non-wing sprint car, midget, micro-sprint, USAC Silver Crown car, modified and IMCA stock car.
Editor’s note: Information gathered by weekend editor Aaron Clay.
