The clean-cut Ricky Thornton Jr. as the aggressor? Dropping F-bombs in post-race interviews and showing no conviction for choosing the rugged, bumpy path to Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series victory lane Saturday night at Golden Isles Speedway?

The even-tempered Jonathan Davenport dishing verbal jabs and literal elbows all the way to the post-race podium? Who expected this theater from the sport’s mild-mannered main characters not even a weekend through the tour’s new season?

OK, Davenport’s elbow to Thornton’s hip during podium photo ops had been nothing more than a light, playful expression of his anger. A nudge with a message. But every antic that went down on Saturday thickened the plot all the more, a plot that clashed the reigning Drivers of the Year and a plot fitting for the event billed as the Super Bowl of Racing. Are these the beginnings of the sport’s next greatest rivalry? It’s telling.

“Had it been someone else, I probably would’ve lifted,” Thornton said, flatly justifying his aggression that thwarted Davenport from the lead with 12 laps to go. “Had it been (Chris) Madden, I would’ve ran second and wouldn’t have even tried it. (Davenport’s) dirtied me a bunch last year. And I’m sure he feels the same way. I was going to take every inch he gave me. And I did."

“We know how the 20RT is going to race,” Davenport rebutted. “That’s fine.”

Davenport stared into thin air for a moment while gritting his teeth — perhaps refraining himself from saying something he’d regret — before proceeding.

“I don’t know,” Davenport said. “I’m going to try and be as professional as I can.”

“He’s mad,” Thornton continued, plainly as ever. “Oh well.”

Sides can be picked. Opinions can be waged. Storylines can be angled a multitude of ways. There are reasons Davenport is angry. And there are reasons Thornton went the measures he did: Parlaying a crevice of space into a passing opportunity on an otherwise narrow racetrack. Contact with Davenport was either a byproduct of the racetrack’s conditions or it’d been intended all along. Thornton suggests both narratives to be true.

“I think it’s one of those deals … it’s one-lane rubber,” Thornton said. “You’re going to run as hard as you can and try to make moves where typically you probably wouldn’t. Had it been someone else, I probably wouldn’t have made those moves. But it’s one of those deals he always ran me really hard, so I was going to run him really hard.”

Apparently Davenport and Thornton have a history. A history that hasn’t been well documented or this big of a fuss before. And a history that’s blurred present day boundary lines. At least, that’s what Davenport sees.

“Who knows what the unwritten rules are, man,” Davenport said. “People that race clean and race professionally don’t run over people in the rubber. We all knew what we had with the racetrack. If you get a run, pinch him off on the outside, (then) whatever. But blatantly going in there and taking somebody’s whole left side off, bad enough you fall back a couple positions, that’s a s— deal. It is what it is.”

How Davenport got to the lead in the first place was by Thornton and Marlar racing hard in a battle of their own. It was lap 37 when Thornton washed up turn four as Marlar challenged to his outside. As Thornton drifted higher, the less room Marlar had to work with. They eventually rubbed doors rounding the frontstretch, their momentum slowing to the point that Davenport squeezed underneath for the lead.

Thornton said if he didn’t stay in the gas battling Marlar — “If I didn’t stand on it,” he said — “it’d knock us back straight and we were going to spin out.”

Thornton pounced on Davenport on lap 48, a sequence that started when he powered off turn two and generated a head of steam he couldn’t temper. Thornton blasted from the top to the very bottom on a dime and Davenport had virtually no chance of countering the blitz.

“I got a good enough run off (turn) two and I crossed him down the back straightaway,” Thornton said. “And I mean, he probably didn’t know I was down there. My right-front was past his left-front by that point, by the time we touched.”

VIDEO: Watch highlights from Saturday's Super Bowl of Racing finale at Golden Isles. 

Thornton is adamant that Davenport isn’t entirely blameless either.

“He left the whole bottom line open because he was swinging out so far. So I took it. When he went to go turn back down, I was there. Obviously he was mad. He ran into me under yellow. … It’s not like I ran into his left-rear and spun him out or something. It is what it is.”

Davenport, meanwhile, still isn’t convinced with Thornton’s reasoning.

“I think it’s pretty easy to see what happened,” he said. “The 20RT and the other car that was running second at the time .. Marlar? Hell, I don’t know. Anyway, they got together. I passed them both, I thought, pretty clean. Then we came down the back straightaway and the 20RT jacked me up, about spun me out getting into three.

“And then I ran the rest of there just kind of protecting the bottom like we do in the rubber, and then obviously he got a big run on me. But took the left side off and knocked us up the track, and Madden got by us at that time.”

SSI Motorsports crew chief Anthony Burroughs has been, and will continue to be, all business in the midst of testy and tense moments such as Saturday. He supports his driver whom he extols as “the best race car driver in this pit area” (“now I’m biased,” he added) and has his back no matter the circumstances.

“One-hundred percent. I have his back no matter what,” Burroughs said. “That’s all I really have to say. We’re not going to sit here and talk a bunch of crap. It is what it is. We’re racing in the rubber. And it sucks. I hate controversy. You want to get along with everybody, but if we’d have a better track or if the move-over flag would’ve been thrown, there’s a lot of things that could’ve prevented that. But it’s racing in the rubber. People are going to cry. We’ve come out on the wrong end of this deal many times.”

The Davenport vs. Thornton kerfuffle is compelling for more than their usually calm demeanors clashing and it being a hot-topic kind of storyline.

One driver is on a quest to return to the top of the sport. The other isn’t going to concede his scepter, reign, and status as Driver of the Year that easily. Perhaps the Davenport-Thornton beef comes down to a power struggle. The SSI Motorsports team knows what they’re up against this year. History of late shows that dominance in the sport is cyclical and finite.

Davenport, whose winning percentage dropped from 30 percent in 2022 (24 wins in 81 races) to 14 percent last year (14 wins in 93 races), can testify. Burroughs admits there’s a pressure to maintaining the precedence they’ve set.

“It’s very difficult,” Burroughs said. “It’s like, we went fourth the other night (at Volusia Speedway Park). We ran good at Volusia, but didn’t win. Everyone is like, what’s wrong? We ran fourth the other night and you’re sitting there thinking, has it been a long time since we won? No, it’s only been four races. We just happened to have five weeks off.

“The expectations are there. And I’m glad they’re there. That means we did have success. But nobody has higher expectations than we have on ourselves. I’m not sitting here saying we’re going to win 30 races. We’re just trying to win the next one. That’s the approach we took last year. And that’s the approach we’re taking this year.”

The longer term implications from Saturday’s uproar are yet to be seen of course. There are a few directions Davenport vs. Thornton can go: Signs of a developing rivalry swells into a full-fledged rivalry, perhaps reaching another notch on Tuesday and Wednesday when the tour heads to Ocala (Fla.) Speedway, the egg-shaped track that Davenport and Thornton won at this time last year. If both drivers chase the Lucas Oil Series, then who knows what the rest of the season could bring, too.

Or maybe the fledgling rivalry fizzles out, say if they find middle ground and come to peaceable terms, tossing Saturday's emotionally charged affair and previous record of wrongs into the sea of forgetfulness.

On the level of reputation and how he could be received from here forward by onlookers and Davenport himself, Thornton understands more boos could be hurled his way and more quote-unquote haters could make themselves known. The boos for him, however, are encouraging.

 “I feel like I got booed tonight, yeah. You use those boos as motivation is the way I see it,” Thornton said. “None of them up there are spending money at my trailer anyway. That’s the way I see it. Everyone has an opinion when it comes to the fans. You win some. You lose some. And you move on.”

“If they’re mad about us racing in the rubber and beating and banging and stuff, they probably don’t understand racing anyway,” Thornton added. “People don’t understand it.”

Besides, it’s not Thornton’s first go-around of boo birds. His prolific modified career has brought on plenty boos.

“I’m used to it when it comes to that,” Thornton said. “As I said, you use it as motivation if anything. They’re probably more mad at the situation tonight than me essentially. If it’d been reversed, I think it’d be the same way. They’d be booing him, too. It is what it is. We’ll move on.”

And how about Thornton’s reputation with Davenport? 

“As far as me and J.D., it is what it is,” Thornton said. “As I said, he’s always raced me hard, so I’m going to race him hard. Whether we beat and bang and one of us gets wrecked or whatever, so be it. We’re here to race. At the end of the day, we both have to make a paycheck. We’re going to run as hard as we can and not try to wreck ourselves, along with other people. But eventually you’re going to have run-ins with everybody. We’re all so competitive. It’s going to happen.”

Davenport, meanwhile, answered more sharply.

“We know how they’re going to race,” Davenport said. “I’ve been around a long time. I know how to do it, too.”

Both drivers have edges that clearly aren’t and have never been dull. When Davenport arrived to the podium, and after he lightly Thornton, the two exchanged words. Chris Madden, all the while, had the best view in the house both on and off the racetrack of the escalating drama. And he’ll stay just that, a bystander with one less public opinion on the matter.

“I seen it all happen. I don’t want to get involved with somebody else’s drama,” Madden said. “For once, it’s not me. I’m just going to stay out of it.

"I’ve seen a lot,” he added through a rising smile. “I’ll leave it at that.”

According to Davenport, we’ve yet to see everything: “It could get exciting on down the road,” he said.