Port Royal Speedway
Anthony Macri Line guides RTJ to big sweep
By Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt staff reporter
Ricky Thornton Jr. celebrates at Port Royal. (heathlawsonphotos.com)
PORT ROYAL, Pa. (Aug. 23) — Ricky Thornton Jr. put his race car where nobody dared going in Saturday’s 50-lap Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series feature at Port Royal Speedway.
Not merely up on the cushion, but his right-rear firmly planted into the curbed-up pile of dirt and his rear quarterpanel smooshed against the guardrail through every corner he could. There’s utilizing the top side at the central Pennsylvania half-mile. And then there’s what the Chandler, Ariz., superstar calls The Anthony Macri Line. | RaceWire
For those unfamiliar, Macri is known for his sprint car mastery of Port Royal — his striking ability to find greater speed by bouncing his right-rear off the outer wall for a turbocharge-effect down the straightaways.
Thornton’s very much acquainted with the fastest, and most treacherous, route around the half-mile. His guilty pleasure and stored-up knowledge from studying highlights and watching open-wheel racing abundantly on FloRacing is what banked him his $60,000 weekend sweep.
“I probably watch so much racing here. Being a big sprint car guy, you just learn a lot of stuff watching them, watching Macri run the wall here,” the 34-year-old Thornton said. “You really just have to commit, get all the way against the wall before turn one, stay on the wall. There’s different spots you can gain momentum here and I feel like if you enter on the wall, your momentum is through the center instead of worrying about exit.”
Thornton wouldn’t have rallied back around Chris Madden and made his race-winning move with five laps to go if not for driving his No. 20rt Koehler Motorsports Late Model like a sprint car, a mentality that’s paid off at Port Royal before.
Flashback to the inaugural Rumble by the River in 2020: Kyle Larson would say the reason he made his Dirt Late Model debut at Port Royal — and won Saturday’s finale in his second-ever start — is because he could race the half-mile like a sprint car.
“Guys like (Macri) and different people, you just learn stuff that you do and you apply it to whatever car you’re in,” Thornton said. “Obviously, being behind (Devin) Moran and Madden and (Jonathan Davenport) and all them, they had run the top (but) they didn’t full commit to the top. I felt you needed to. I don’t know, I don’t know if I was dumb or lucky. I just felt like I needed to run up there hard, get my speed, get going.”
And did Thornton ever find speed. While 21 of Saturday’s 25 starters clocked their fastest lap of the 50-lap feature within the opening 10 circuits, Thornton was his quickest on lap 24 when he initially took the lead from Madden.
Factoring in their history, an argument could be made that Thornton only drove harder down the stretch. It was his first head-to-head battle for the win against Madden since the rivals went face-to-face in victory lane following their 1-2 finish in November’s World Finals finale at The Dirt Track at Charlotte.
Madden spent the final three months of the 2024 season as Thornton’s Koehler Motorsports crew chief, but bad feelings escalated between the two at the World of Outlaws season-ending event. In their rematch Saturday, the testiest moment between the two came on the lap-38 restart when Madden landed the go-ahead slider for the lead that shut the door on the top-running Thornton.
Staying in the fuel as Madden slid up the track, Thornton shoved his car under Madden’s back, a sequence that eventually stunted Thornton’s momentum and allowed Moran to drop Thornton to third.
Under the next caution period on lap 41, Thornton pulled alongside Madden to express his displeasure with him (“He told me I was his best friend,” Madden said with a sly laugh when a reporter asked about Thornton’s caution-period hand signals).
Thornton eventually made his way back around Madden on lap 46 and set sail from there, winning by nearly two seconds.
When asked if he races Madden any harder considering their history, Thornton dismissed the question, but didn’t shy away from saying he doesn’t move out of Madden’s way.
“I wouldn’t say we race any harder. I’d say we race each other hard regardless. It’s $50,000-to-win. I would say we probably don’t give each other extra room,” Thornton said. “Obviously, just, we’re all here to win. It’s no different than, like, me and Devin. We were throwing sliders. Me and J.D. were throwing sliders. We all race for a living anymore. You run as hard as you can.”
In his postrace interview with FloRacing pit reporter Dustin Jarrett, Madden said Thornton “could’ve turned left or hit the brake pedal or whatever” and that “he slid me in three and four, and I had to get on the brake pedal.” Ultimately, “it is what it is” and Thornton “got the job done and done a good job.”
Thornton, meanwhile, still thought Madden’s slider on the lap-38 restart came prematurely.
“The one restart, I felt like I got a decent start. He kind of slid to me and I got back around him,” Thornton said. “Then the next one, he kind of did the same thing, and then at the last second ended up sliding all the way across my nose. Ran into the back of him. I don’t know, I didn’t feel like it was the right move for him probably at that point. I don’t know, I had a better car than he did. It was almost desperation mode at that point.”
Thornton added that he “luckily kept going” and only slipped to third following Madden’s restart slider. From there, he still had a gameplan to win.
“I knew my best shot to get by Devin was as soon as I could. I’d need five or six laps to make a run at Madden,” Thornton said. “Luckily Devin left the top open just enough I was able to get a really good run crossing the back straightaway to slide him. He wasn’t able to cross me and slide me in one, and that allowed me to have a huge run. Got to Madden and I pretty much did the same thing. Got into three and broke Madden’s momentum whenever he crossed me.
“And tried to make sure, whenever I got to one, I was in the right position so if he did slide me back, I was able to cross him. He drove in hard like he was going to slide me, but then didn’t. And I was able to drive back around him. I think the last six, seven, laps I ran as hard as I could in one and two, and tried not to make a mistake in three and four. I felt like one and two is where I made up all my ground. Three and four, if you can just manage. It worked out for us.”
Unlike Friday, Thornton felt he and his Koehler Motorsports team brought the car to beat Saturday. The night before, Thornton gave Davenport the advantage car-wise, knowing full well he won the $10,000 feature by simply blasting around the top of turns one and two once Davenport passed him through the middle on lap 30 of 40.
Thornton added that after feeling too laggy for his liking in dirty air Friday, he worked on making his car more aero-savvy Saturday morning, particularly tinkering with the body on different corners of the race car. It made a difference Saturday.
“I don’t know if we for sure had the best car last night. But I felt like we had the best car tonight,” Thornton said. “Went back to the shop this week, worked for four days straight, kind of all day and all night. Just hoping to figure out a couple things that were wrong on the car. Really, we didn’t find a ton of stuff, but we found a couple little things. When we’re racing in the 1 percent, I feel like anytime you can find speed, it’s critical. I feel like it really showed this weekend.”
The sixth-starting Thornton didn’t just blaze the top from the drop of the green. He managed his tires early on and once he gained his bearings, he upped the ante.
“Start of the race, I felt I had a really good car. I ran across the middle to the bottom, just trying to slowly get my tires worked in so I didn’t blister them running the top,” Thornton said. “We had that yellow on lap 12 or 13, and I was like, ‘All right, it’s kinda time to go.’ That way, if it did get one lane or whatever, you can be the car out front. It just kind of worked out for us. Like I said, I could enter one so much harder, so much higher, than they were. And really, you got to have confidence in the car to do it.”
Thornton’s had perhaps, outside of Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, the best-performing car on half-miles this year. Of his 14 total victories, eight are on half-miles (three wins at Port Royal, two at Florida’s Volusia Speedway Park, two at Florida’s All-Tech Raceway and one at Maryland’s Hagerstown Speedway).
Now the question is, can Thornton translate this success on half-miles to Eldora’s egg-shaped, slick-track nature? He says there’s still work for him to do before Sept. 4-6’s World 100 at Eldora.
“Eldora is just so different. Coming here, Georgetown (Speedway in Delaware), Hagerstown, Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania Motor Speedway), I feel like all the big places we go to, I feel like we have a really good package,” said Thornton, who has an average finish of 13.3 in six World 100 feature starts. “We worked on our aero really, really, really hard to fine-tune exactly what we need.
“Last night, I wasn’t very good in traffic. And really, I worked out some body stuff today just trying to get my aero so when I get in dirty air, I can still be able to steer, and stuff like that. I feel like I got better.”
Thornton, whose best Eldora major event finish is fourth in the 2023 Dream, is trying a new approach going into the World 100. He’s bringing a brand-new Longhorn Chassis and engine to the Big E, which he’ll break in Sunday at the 17th annual Earl Baltes Classic sanctioned by the Valvoline American Late Model Iron-Man Series.
“We built this car at Ocala earlier this year, and it’s been really good since. We got a new one, that way we can get it out and see what it’s going to do before (Lucas Oil Series) playoff time,” said Thornton, who leads the Lucas Oil standings by 10 points over Davenport. “That way if something was to happen during playoffs, we know we have another really good spare. We’ll go to Eldora Sunday, and hopefully the new car as a lot of speed.”
Like Port Royal, he’ll also study up on recent sprint car racing highlights at Eldora, partially last month’s Kings Royal, which, by the way, was won by Macri.
“I watch as much sprint car stuff as I can,” Thornton said. “That’s the nice part about Flo. I feel like every Sunday, I can watch all the highlights and stuff like that. I don’t know, I probably need to brush up a little bit on my Eldora stuff. Like I said, Kings Royal and all that. Qualifying is so critical there. You have your inverts and all that, but you still have to put yourself in the right position. We’ll see how it goes.”
