Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Reunion awaits RTJ's return to greatness
Ricky Thornton Jr. and his Koehler Motorsports crew chief, Anthony Burroughs, never thought that reuniting for the 2026 season after a year-and-a-half apart would immediately result in the type of spectacular success they previously enjoyed. They’re both well aware of Dirt Late Model racing’s immense challenges.
That doesn’t make the struggles they’ve experienced this season any easier to accept. Winning races at an otherworldly clip — like Thornton did under Burroughs’s guidance with 51 victories from the start of the ’23 campaign through July 2024 — was certainly too much to expect, but was it really possible that they’d be sitting here in late July with just five triumphs and mired in sixth in the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series points standings?
The 52-year-old Burroughs, former Dirt Late Model driver who has worked as a crew chief for more than a decade, didn’t think so. But he also knows it’s part of the game, no matter how much racers with sparkling performance records can’t quite understand why they’re not producing up to their standards.
“Everybody’s been working hard and trying, but sometimes it’s just that our old sport don’t have a kind heart,” Burroughs said. “It’s humbling, but you sit back and you’re like … I told (girlfriend) Darla, I’m like, ‘I never took any of those wins for granted, but it’s just like, man, are we ever going to win another race?’
“And you know you're doing the right things. That’s the biggest thing.”
Burroughs spoke those words Saturday amid the team’s highest point of the season. Thornton, 35, was dominant in powering to a flag-to-flag victory worth $52,000 in the Lucas Oil-sanctioned Al Belt Custom Homes Silver Dollar Nationals at Shelby County Speedway in Harlan, Iowa, giving him his first full-field win since a WoO score on May 28 at Wayne County Speedway in Orrville, Ohio.
There was no hiding the liberating feeling the crown-jewel checkered flag had brought Burroughs, Thornton and crew members Justin Tharpe, who also worked with RTJ during his previous run with Burroughs, and Seth Hunter, who joined the team in May after graduating from the University of Northwest Ohio’s motorsports program. Good vibes were flowing just like the cold beer Burroughs was pouring through his lips.
“Our team, we needed it, man. We needed it,” Burroughs said, a smile dominating his face. “It just been one of those years where things just ain’t went our way. Some of it’s self-inflicted, some of it’s not. We’ve had speed and we’ve just had crappy stuff happen.
“It all worked out tonight and it does feel really, really good, and relieved a little bit, but we’re gonna wake up in the morning and go to work and see if we can get a little better.”
Thornton offered a similar outlook. After accommodating a long line of fans who sought his autograph and a picture following the race — while he’s a native of Chandler, Ariz., he now lives in Indianola, Iowa, so winning in the Hawkeye State is always a big deal for him — he succinctly summed up his less-than-stellar ’26 returns.
“It’s definitely a big relief,” Thornton said. “Not saying that we don’t feel capable of winning, it’s just I feel like every time we’re good, we have bad luck. I feel like we’re back on the right track. The crazy part is, there’s nothing different that we haven’t been doing all year, but you have a night like tonight and now we’re really feeling good.”
No one in the Dirt Late Model world could have foreseen ’26 being such a grind for Thornton after the news broke back in December that Burroughs and Tharpe were rejoining Thornton following a 2025 spent with Riggs Motorsports and driver Brandon Overton under the Longhorn Factory Team banner. Wouldn’t it be just like old times?
The Thornton-Burroughs pairing clicked in its first installment. It began in the summer of 2021 when Burroughs was hired as Thornton’s crew chief at Morgantown, Ind.-based SSI Motorsports. They won just once over the remainder of that season and a modest four times in ’22, but then Thornton exploded into a superstar in ’23. He enjoyed one of the best campaigns in Dirt Late Model history, winning 34 times — including crown jewel victories in the Firecracker 100, Prairie Dirt Classic and Knoxville Nationals — and earning more than $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.
It appeared to be more of the same for the duo in ’24 as Thornton bolted to 17 triumphs by the end of June, but one week later SSI Motorsports owner Todd Burns decided to part ways with Thornton in a move that shocked the industry. 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 ended up winning the Lucas Oil Series championship.
Thornton’s team owner, Bobby Koehler, lured Burroughs and Tharpe back with Thornton for ’26, but the magic didn’t pick right up. A winless Georgia-Florida Speedweeks to kick off the season signaled that this was no longer 2023-24, and the victories that did come in the ensuing months — Lucas Oil shows March 28 at Atomic Speedway in Alma, Ohio, and May 1 at Circle City Speedway in Indianapolis, Ind. — weren’t followed by Thornton’s typical hot streaks.
While Thornton has flashed speed with his Longhorn Chassis, he just hasn’t been able to truly get rolling. He's posted back-to-back podium finishes only three times this season and consecutive top-five finishes just eight times. Since May, he’s recorded nearly twice as many finishes of 15th or worse (11) as podiums (six). Overall Thornton has made 54 starts with his Koehler Motorsports equipment and tallied five wins among 21 top-five and 38 top-10 finishes. (He also has a single victory in Jan. 9’s Wild West Shootout opener at Central Arizona Speedway in Casa Grande driving an Adam Family Racing entry.)
Those statistics don’t equate to Ricky Thornton Jr. doing Ricky Thornton Jr. things. It’s simply been a strange year, one where Thornton can’t get hot. Whenever he shows his vintage form and appears ready to set sail, what soon follows is a some sort of misfortune or misstep that dulls his momentum.
Case in point was Thornton’s Silver Dollar Nationals victory. He went from riding high to finishing 12th in Tuesday’s FloRacing Night in America feature at Lincoln (Ill.) Speedway after a flat tire struck him while running third and placing sixth in Wednesday’s FloRacing-sanctioned One for the Road headliner at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway.
“Par for the course this season,” Thornton said at Fairbury of his failure to catch fire this season.
It’s all so perplexing to a driver who has become so accustomed to winning races in bunches since his arrival as a full-time Dirt Late Model competitor.
“It shows how hard this sport is,” Thornton said. “And really, there’s nothing different this year than it was last year. Burroughs makes a lot of the calls, but I’m still making 100 percent of the calls at the end of the day just like I was last year, just like we were before that. So, like, we’re still all super involved. It’s just stuff hasn't lined up like it like it has.
“We were off at Speedweeks and then I feel like we’ve gotten way better since then. But then it’s like every time we get a good run, we have bad luck and pop a tire, break a driveshaft, do something weird that like we just never had problems with. And not like it’s a part supply problem either. It’s just bad luck overall.”
Thornton will concede that through his struggles “there’s times I get out of the car and I’m pissed,” but he stressed that he tells his crew, “If I'm mad, I’m not mad at you guys. I’m mad at the situation.”
“You just got to make sure at the end of the day,” Thornton continued, “if you don't give 110 percent every time you’re out there, and you’re not being positive about stuff, that’s whenever you really get down in a slump.”
That’s where Burroughs sees a positive amid the pain. They haven’t lived up the hype in their second tour of duty together, but there’s been no quit in anyone on the team.
“Nobody puts more pressure on us than ourselves, so we’ve all been disappointed,” Burroughs said at Shelby County. “But the biggest thing is that I’m proud of more than the win is nobody’s given up. Everybody’s kept their head down on and worked really hard.”
When asked if the racetrack whispers and social-media talk that Thornton and Burroughs can’t get it done is something that affects a team, Burroughs admitted, “It does.”
“And I talked to Ricky about it the other day,” Burroughs said. “I was like, you know, the thing we got to do is make sure it don’t get in our heads, because you can look at Billy (Moyer) and Scott (Bloomquist) and (Jonathan) Davenport and anybody who’s won a lot, all these good guys … as bad as we want to win every one of them, we’re not going to win them all every year, so you just can’t let it get in your head. You just got to keep your head down and keep working and stay positive, and fortunately, we’ve done that. And the car owners have been supportive.
“I’m not a social media guy, but I hear the rumbles and it gets you down a little bit. I get the passion and everything, but they don’t know us. They don’t know what we’re going through.
“But luckily, the people in our core group have stayed positive. And I really appreciate Bobby and Jessica (Koehler) being as supportive as they’ve been. They’ve given us everything, and that’s the thing. We have everything. We have all the tools. We have good guys. It’s just been one of those years.
“But we got a lot of racing to do, and it’s a good time to get going, when all the money is on the line (with major events in the coming weeks),” he added. “We’re gonna stay after it. If you can get a get on a roll, especially whenever all the money's on the line, it’s definitely when you want to get on a roll.”
Burroughs credits Thornton with refusing to lay down, which keeps everyone on the team fighting. They’ll attempt to make this weekend’s WoO-sanctioned Prairie Dirt Classic at Fairbury — a race Thornton won in 2023 for one of his seven career crown jewel victories — another turning point of their season.
“Ricky’s been really good,” Burroughs said. “He’s handled (the struggles) as good as you could. Listen, that guy’s one of the best that’s ever been in our sport, and for us to go through this, you couldn’t ask for anybody to handle it any better than what he has.
“We’ve just put our heads down and we’ve tried to work hard. We got a good group of people back at the shop (in Mount Airy, N.C.) with Kenny Payton and Bryce (Nichols), and as the crew chief I’ve tried to keep everyone focused.
Burroughs, who played football for the University of Alabama in the early ‘90s, said he tries to “use my athletic background and my experience from being coached my whole life, so my line to my guys is, ‘We know when we unload every day with that guy driving, we got a chance to win, no matter how bad it's been.’
“We’re not Debbie Downers, and we're not going to surround ourselves with Debbie Downers,” he continued. “We’re going to work hard, we’re going to stay motivated, we’re going to block out the noise. We believe in each other and we're just going to keep working.”
