Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: RTJ, Burroughs embarking on second act
Anthony Burroughs had an inkling that somehow, someday, he’d turn wrenches again for Ricky Thornton Jr. The abrupt finish of their first wildly successful run together as crew chief-driver wouldn’t end their shared story.
“I’m not a fossil yet, so you never know,” Burroughs said, indicating that, at 52, he still has plenty of prime racing years left him in him for a second act with Thornton. “In the back of your mind, you know, the relationship I had with him, you’re like, I mean, that’s the ideal one you're looking for.”
Now they are indeed back as a high-profile pairing roughly a year-and-a-half after Thornton’s shocking release from SSI Motorsports broke them apart. Earlier this month came the official announcement that Burroughs had left Riggs Motorsports, where he worked in 2025 with driver Brandon Overton of Evans, Ga., under the Longhorn Factory Team banner, to join the 35-year-old Thornton at Koehler Motorsports. Burroughs also brought along Riggs crewman Justin Tharp, who worked with Thornton at SSI for the first half of ’24.
This was a development that rekindled memories for the Dirt Late Model world and, of course, Burroughs, whose stature in the sport rose alongside Thornton’s over nearly three years toiling side-by-side.
“I’m really pumped up to be back and get going with Ricky,” Burroughs said on Dec. 4, the day before a Kubota Gateway Dirt Nationals preliminary program at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Mo., marked his first race with Thornton since July 6, 2024, at Muskingum County Speedway in Zanesville, Ohio. “We’ll see what happens. There’s no guarantees in life, obviously, especially in our sport, but we’re going to work really hard at it and see if we can pick up where we left off.”
Burroughs originally linked up with Thornton, a native of Chandler, Ariz., now living in Indianola, Iowa, in August 2021 when Thornton was in the midst of a Rookie of the Year season on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series with SSI. A native of Muscle Shoals, Ala., Burroughs arrived at SSI with nearly a decade of experience as a crew chief after abandoning his pursuit of a full-time Dirt Late Model driving career in favor of more opportunities on the mechanical side. Prior to Thornton, he did crew-chiefing stints with 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) and Brian Shirley (January 2020-July 2020); his runs with Landers, Francis, Lanigan, O’Neal and Richards were with Clint Bowyer Racing.
While the Burroughs-Thornton teaming that began in the summer of 2021 with a non-Lucas Oil start at Ponderosa Speedway in Junction City, Ky., started slowly (one win over the remaining ’21 season, four in ’22), it exploded in ’23. Thornton enjoyed one of the best campaigns in Dirt Late Model history, winning 34 times — including crown jewel scores in the Firecracker 100, Prairie Dirt Classic and Knoxville Nationals — and earning over $1 million despite falling short of the Lucas Oil Series title, after dominating the schedule, because of bad luck in the inaugural winner-take-all playoff finale.
They appeared headed to another seven-figure season in 2024 with 17 triumphs by the end of June, but the magical combination was ended one week later when SSI Motorsports owner Todd Burns decided to part ways with Thornton. Burroughs remained with SSI for the remainder of the season as Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., was hired as Thornton’s replacement while Thornton went on to Koehler Motorsports and pieced together a national program on the fly that ultimately resulted in him capturing the Lucas Oil Series championship.
A line of communication between Burroughs and Thornton continued throughout their time apart, including this season as Burroughs led Overton’s Riggs Motorsports effort. They developed too much of a friendship, and experienced too much together, to not remain close.
“Ricky and I stayed in contact from the get-go,” Burroughs said. “One Sunday night after B-Dub’s (Buffalo Wild Wings) — every week win, lose or draw we go to B-Dub’s (as a crew) — we were just texting back and forth. We talk about things confidentially with each other, and he said that he had talked (with Koehler Motorsports owner Bobby Koehler) about maybe seeing if we can work something out (to reunite). We really didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it, and then things got a little bit more serious and a little bit more serious.”
As Riggs Motorsports announced recently that Overton would remain the team’s driver in 2026 but take over equipment preparation at a shop near his home in Georgia with the Longhorn Factory Team connection disbanded, Burroughs told team owner Scott Riggs that he and Tharp would be moving to Koehler Motorsports. That change meant Burroughs and his longtime girlfriend, Darla, would have to relocate 84 miles from China Grove, N.C., to Koehler Motorsports’ headquarters in Mount Airy, N.C., but a third move in as many years (they were in Morgantown, Ind., while with SSI) was acceptable for the chance to rejoin Thornton.
“We gotta move again, and that really sucks,” Burroughs said. “And it sucks to change jobs. In a professional world, you don’t want to be going bouncing from job to job to job, but in our sport, sometimes it’s just the way it goes.”
The transition was made easy by Bobby Koehler, the easy-going, 43-year-old businessman who welcomed Burroughs and Tharp with open arms.
“I kind of talked to him a little bit here and there,” Burroughs said of his previous dealings with Koehler. “But now, just getting to know him and being around (his sons) Jordan and Evan and (wife) Miss Jessica … they’re really good people and I’m really excited to work for them. He’s just a really good dude, and the thing is, he really likes racing.
“Obviously they’ve built a really, really good program with Ricky, and for them to trust us to come and be a part of it, it’s pretty cool.”
After having Thornton’s crew largely in flux throughout his year-and-a-half at Koehler Motorsports, Koehler was receptive to bringing aboard Burroughs and Tharp to work alongside Zach Frields, an experienced 44-year-old from Davenport, Iowa, who joined the team for the 2025 season.
“As long as they’re happy, I’m happy,” Koehler said. “We run this team as a family. Ricky felt like he wanted (Burroughs) to be here as part of the family, so he’s climbed right on board. It’s taking the workload off other people because they’ve already worked together before.
“We’ve had Ricky Arnold and (Chris) Madden come along and help (Thornton in 2024), but we brought Madden in with intentions of being done after the (Lucas Oil) Chase — we knew that in the beginning. Birky (Brian Birkhofer) come on (this year) just to fill a spot (late in the season), and we knew after the chase, he was done. So these people was coming in with us knowing when they're going to leave and what our goal is.
“So (for 2026) we got the right group of guys, we think, and they’re all happy together,” he added. “So far the chemistry has been pretty good around the shop, so we just hope it carries on. Zach’s still a big part of it, so now we’ve got three guys that can do the job that, you know, I want out it.”
Burroughs recognizes the mechanical strength that he, Tharp and Frields can provide Thornton. He believes no Dirt Late Model team has a better trio of crew members, something he pointed out to Tharp and Frields as they rode to the Gateway Dirt Nationals in the Koehler Motorsports hauler with NASCAR Cup Series regular Austin Cindic’s transporter driver — a good friend of Koehler — handling driving duties.
“We sat down and talked,” Burroughs said. “I mean, we had already talked, but it was the first time we’d been able to really sit and talk, just the three of us, and I told them, I mean, it’s like, our team should be deeper than anybody’s team with exception of maybe Rocket1, but we should be as an equal. We can all help each other, do each other’s jobs. And everybody’s job is just as important as the next guy.”
Koehler pointed out that “the good part with Ricky and Anthony separating for a year-and-a-half is, Ricky had to learn the car. The knowledge and the data now is going to be so much more because Ricky’s been his own crew chief for the last year now.”
Burroughs agrees with Koehler’s assessment.
“I mean, obviously he’s doing quite well being his own crew chief,” Burroughs said of Thornton, who authored an 18-victory season in 2025 topped by his first World 100 victory. “I’ve said before, even back in ’21, before we got on the roll, that our sport hasn’t seen his talent in a long time, and it hasn’t. His performance speaks for himself. And then obviously, he’s a pretty good crew chief. He did a pretty good job, and I think that's going to help us, too.
“Before we would be like, ‘OK, we need to do this, this, this,’ and he might be thinking, ‘Well, I wonder what that’s going to feel like.’ Well, now he’s been doing it himself, so when we talk about that, he’s going to say, ‘Yeah, maybe not, because it feels like this or that.’”
Burroughs and his girlfriend were on a week-long Caribbean cruise when the announcement of his Koehler Motorsports hiring was made, so he only spent one day in the team’s shop before leaving for St. Louis and the Gateway Dirt Nationals. Not surprisingly, it looked like old times for the pair when racing commenced as Thornton won Dec. 5’s preliminary feature — the 57th victory for RTJ and Burroughs as crew chief and driver — and finished second to Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., in the following day’s finale.
“I mean, our communication, it’s like we’ve never been apart,” Burroughs said.
And as the 2026 season approaches — likely starting with Jan. 10-18’s Wild West Shootout at Central Arizona Raceway in Casa Grande before Georgia-Florida Speedweeks and a Lucas Oil Series assault — Burroughs sees the chemistry and shared mindset he had with Thornton as the key to continued checkered flags.
“It’s all about the people and believing in each other and having each other’s back, no matter what, through the good, the bad and indifferent,” said Burroughs, well known for his organization and attention to detail with his preparation. “That’s one of the things that Ricky and I think was the biggest reason for our success. We always … he knew I had his back and I knew he had mine, and the guys were the same way. That’s just going to continue.”
Ten things worth mentioning
1. Thornton’s Kubota Gateway Dirt Nationals preliminary victory was his first with Burroughs since the pair clicked for a second consecutive triumph in the Firecracker 100 at Lernerville Speedway on June 22, 2024, just two weeks before Thornton’s release from SSI Motorsports. Their first win as driver-crew chief? The Dirt Track World Championship on Oct. 16, 2021, at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park, a $100,000 score that marked Thornton’s first career crown jewel victory.
2. Bobby Koehler said his son Jordan and Evan plan to maintain racing schedules next season similar to what they ran in 2025, hitting a limited number of special events across the Southeast and beyond. He noted that his boys don’t have designs on pursuing full-time careers as drivers; both are focused on jobs outside racing as Jordan already operates a trash business, Capital Waste, and Evan, a home-schooled high-school senior, is pointed toward running a concrete company.
3. With Burroughs’s addition to Koehler Motorsports, Jordan and Evan Koehler will receive more attention from team member Kenny Payton, who will be freed up to spend additional time with the Koehler siblings. Payton, the longest-tenured Koehler Motorsports employee, has offered help to Thornton’s effort whenever needed since RTJ came aboard.
4. Also notable for Koehler Motorsports: earlier this year Bobby Koehler ended his short run as a racetrack owner-promoter when he sold Ultimate Motorsports Park in Elkin, N.C., to Chuck Melton, a Mount Airy, N.C., businessman who is reopening the track in 2026 under its previous Friendship Motor Speedway name. The track was quiet in 2025 as Koehler last hosted a race there in October ’24.
5. Earlier this week I joined my fellow DirtonDirt staffers in traveling to Austin, Texas, for the annual FloSports offsite meeting, which featured a question-and-answer session with former Eldora Speedway owner and NASCAR champion Tony Stewart. He of course offered his thoughts on the impact his association with FloRacing has had on Eldora, but during his time on stage with FloRacing general manager and DirtonDirt founder Michael Rigsby he also provided some lighthearted comments that had the crowd chuckling. For instance, when Rigsby brought up the Patas monkey, Mojo, whom Stewart had as a pet for a stretch during the 2000s, Stewart recounted the time he was flying somewhere on his private plane with Mojo and the primate jumped forward and started “turning knobs” on the control panel. Stewart said the pilot had to make some quick corrections to avoid a crash, which led to Stewart adding a barrier behind the pilot to prevent Mojo from causing any future mid-air problems.
6. Stewart, by the way, eventually had to give up Mojo in 2008 when the monkey became a bit too aggressive as he grew up. He was donated to the Houston zoo where he became part of the monkey exhibit.
7. Rigsby set himself up for some good-natured ridicule from Stewart when he had a photo put on the video screen in the meeting room that showed a young, pre-teen Rigsby wearing big glasses and a John Gill shirt while happily waving a diecast car in his left hand during a visit to Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway. Stewart joked about Rigsby’s, uh, interesting look, but Rigsby had a reason for showing the picture: he said that day some three decades ago he obtained his first autograph from Stewart, who was in action that evening.
8. When I walked into a barbecue joint in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday night for dinner with DirtonDirt colleagues Todd Turner, Kyle McFadden and Aaron Clay, what song happened to be playing on the restaurant’s speakers? It was Dylan Scott’s “This Town’s Been Too Good For Us,” which, of course, has been used as the opening hype song for each FloRacing Night in America broadcast for the last two years. I thought that certainly was an interesting coincidence.
9. Congratulations to Lucas Oil Series regular Carson Ferguson of Lincolnton, N.C., and his girlfriend Makenna Adkins, who were engaged last weekend when Ferguson proposed while they were in Indianapolis for the Performance Racing Industry Trade Show and the Lucas Oil Series awards banquet.
10. I think I have a contender for Shirt of the Year worn by a Dirt Late Model personality. I spotted a photo on Facebook of engineer extraordinaire and car owner Kevin Rumley, while vacationing over the past week in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic with his wife Jaqueline, sporting a button-down, Hawaiian-type shirt covered with pictures of cats wearing sunglasses and floating in water on donut inflatables. Cook look, Kevin!
