Circle City Raceway
Notes: After Circle City cleans up, RTJ cleans up
By Bryan Ault
Special to DirtonDirt
Ricky Thornton Jr. (20rt) completes his winning move. (David Allio/racingphotoarchives.com)
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (May 1) — Picking up his second career victory at Circle City Raceway on Friday was a boon for Ricky Thornton Jr.’s confidence, and it has the 35-year-old driver from Chandler, Ariz. eagerly looking forward to Saturday's $25,000-to-win Ralph Latham Memorial on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky. | RaceWire
The Chandler, Ariz., driver outdueled race-long leader Hudson O’Neal with nine laps to go amid traffic, grabbing is second Lucas Oil victory of the season and a $15,000 check. Biding his time and waiting for the tight, quarter-mile bullring to widen out was the key to Thornton's victory, his first since March 29 at Atomic Speedway near Chillicothe, Ohio.
“I feel like, by watching so many midget and sprint car races here, like once it gets so technical around the top, the bottom’s gonna come in,” Thornton said in victory lane. “It was just gonna take a little bit of traffic to slow (Hudson O’Neal) down and have to move around. It worked out for us.”
The first 40 laps of the A-main were all O’Neal, as he was able to snatch the lead on the opening lap from polesitter Mike Marlar of Winfield, Tenn. From his sixth starting spot, Thornton surged to third on lap 29, passing Max Blair, and snuck around Marlar for second two laps later.
“Track just kind of came to us,” Thornton said during postrace technical inspection. “And then I was able to kind of move around, get a couple good laps, yellows and restarts where I needed to be. And it just kind of worked out for me.”
“I'd say a little bit of tires, a little bit of just the way I drive and how I set the car,” he added. “When (the track) is dirty, I'm not very good. And then once that kind of goes away, I feel really good. I just kind of needed to wait for it to slow down and get wide.”
From there, the tour veteran pursued and overtook O’Neal, trading sliders for two laps after overtaking the Martinsville, Ind. driver for good on lap 42, taking home the checkered flag. Thornton, who has plenty of experience of racing at the tight, quarter-mile bullring on the east side of Indianapolis, praised the track’s prep crew especially in cool weather conditions and after a week of heavy rain.
“You can go to the bottom, you can go through the middle and you can run across the 2-foot curb,” said Thornton, a Northern Allstars Late Model Dirt Series winner at Circle City two seasons ago. “I haven't been on the running on a curb like that in a while, but that's why I like coming here to Circle City. I wish we came here twice a year, not just once a year. You could race really good and if you're really good, you could set up a guy and pass him and then keep going and get to the next guy. I love short tracks and it's about the shortest one we go to.”
Thornton has struggled this season, at least by the standards he’s set for the past three years on tour where winning by big margins has been the norm rather than the exception. He’s the previous winner of Florence’s Ralph Latham Memorial (it rained out in 2024-25) and Thornton finished second to Bobby Pierce during last year’s Sunoco Race Fuels North-South 100 at the northern Kentucky oval.
“I felt like we were really good at Georgetown and I just got over the curb and knocked the driveshaft out of it which was all my own fault,” Thornton said of last weekend’s woes. “I felt like we were probably the second-place car at Hagerstown, and I just tried it so hard that I hurt myself. Here, I just tried to get back to normal. I just paced myself, got going, and it worked out. Obviously, with the rain and all that, it’ll be either really muddy or really dry. I know they'll work hard. I feel like we've been fortunate enough to win (at Florence) a few times, and hopefully we can do it again tomorrow.”
Ebert progressing
Second-year tour driver Dan Ebert continues making progress on the Lucas Oil series. Backing up an 11th-place run at Hagerstown (Md.) Speedway with a sixth-place finish at Circle City has the 38-year-old driver from Lake Shore, Minn. excited about what’s ahead.
“It helps so much,” Ebert said of his strong qualifying time at Circle City. “It's easier to keep up with the racetrack if you're starting out up to speed. When you're not up to speed, a lot of times you're playing catchup with the race car and then you're playing catchup with the racetrack, where if your race car is pretty balanced and pretty right, you’ve just got to keep up with the racetrack.”
“I mean, we've had pretty good speed the last two, three weeks, but we made some bad calls, had some flat tires in the feature,” Ebert said. “Like, in features, we just haven't adjusted correctly. We're timing in pretty good. We're heat racing good. I feel like tonight we finally showed what we can do in a feature.”
Qualifying up front and finishing up front has been a rare combo for Ebert, but he pulled it off Friday. In a tight three-way battle with Thornton and Marlar, he climbed to fourth on lap 30 before setting for sixth, one spot behind series points leader Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio. The sixth-place finish was his best of the season and best since a seventh-place run in the tour's season opener at All-Tech Raceway in Ellisville, Fla.
“I've been kind of down on myself because I feel like we've had better speed than what our feature results have shown,” Ebert said. “It's like, if you're watching just results, you'd say, ‘Well, geez, you know, you haven't really improved that much,’ but, I mean, the whole package … We are timing better, we are heat racing better, we’ve just got to get the whole package together and tonight, I feel like we actually show it a little bit of it.”
Driveshaft dooms Hess
Circle City wasn’t the track 41-year-old Dave Hess Jr. of Waterford, Penn. really planned to race this weekend. The Keystone State driver made the haul for Lucas Oil tour’s weekend doubleheader because of today’s race at Florence, a track he’s always wanted to tackle.
“We’ve been wanting to go to Florence for quite some time,” Hess said. “There’s been two different occasions where I was headed to Florence and both times it ended up raining out. We just never made it. We’ve always wanted to go, so we looked (the Ralph Latham Memorial) up and then I saw there racing here the night before, so I looked Circle City up. It’s a quarter-mile, and that's kind of right up our alley, too.”
Hess showed speed in hot laps, but missed a corner when qualifying, subtracting precious tenths of a second off his time, but won the B-main and was aiming for a top-10 before his driveshaft broke on lap 24, knocking him out of contention and finishing 22nd.
“We felt so good hot-lapping and we were good, and then time trials, I just kind of missed the lap a little bit, got us searching a little bit, and it was kind of tough conditions to get behind in,” Hess said. “It took us the rest of the night, but I felt like we were working our way back towards the top 10 there.”
A top-10 run would’ve been great for Hess, and the bad break wasn’t in the cards. He rolled out a new-to-him 2024 Longhorn Chassis for Circle City with fresh equipment under the fenders.
“I kind of built up (momentum) on the wall, but it didn't feel like a hit enough to break a driveshaft for me, so I don't know if we had an issue or something,” he said. “You know, it's brand new stuff, just the first night out, so we had a weak (driveshaft) or something like that. We're not seeing anything else that caused it, so just bad luck, I suppose.”
