Todd Burns isn’t a Dirt Late Model car owner seeking the spotlight. He’s content to stay in the background and watch his SSI Motorsports team race and, of course, win, something his operation has done on a historic level over the past year-and-a-half with Ricky Thornton Jr. of Chandler, Ariz., behind the wheel.

The 64-year-old businessman from Morgantown, Ind., doesn’t even attend many races in person because of his commitments running a construction company and farm, which, considering his team’s lofty success, makes his face largely unfamiliar to the racing public.

But with Sunday's decision to release Thornton as his driver after four-plus seasons together highlighted by a spectacular million-dollar 2023 campaign, Burns’s name became much more known than he would ever prefer. The entire Dirt Late Model world began discussing — often in uncomplimentary ways — what could possibly motivate him to abruptly sever ties with a driver who had produced an amazing 50 victories since the start of the ’23 season and helped establish SSI Motorsports as one of the top teams in the game.

“This is not really the way I like to do headlines for sure,” Burns said Tuesday evening as he reflected on the firestorm set off by Thornton’s shocking departure while also announcing Hudson O’Neal of Martinsville, Ind., as his team’s new pilot. “It’s the furthest thing from what we set out to do this year. It’s definitely not been planned or anything at all.”

Burns realizes that anyone outside his tight circle of trust will always have a hard time comprehending how he could, right in the middle of yet another wonderful season, break up his All-Pro combination of Thornton, crew chief Anthony Burroughs and crew members D.J. Williams and Justin Tharp. He seemed to have everything a car owner could possibly want from their team. Performance obviously wasn’t an issue because how could an owner honestly expect any more than what Thornton has provided?

There’s no explanation that Burns could offer to assuage all the observers left dumbstruck by the news and he’s not going to attempt it.

“We’re not gonna release the why’s and why-not’s,” Burns said of his ultimate reasons for making his move with Thornton. “That’s between us and personal. We both have an admiration for each other, I hope, and it’s a life lesson learned, let’s put it that way.

“But we have nothing bad to say about Ricky at all. He’s a heck of a wheelman and a great guy and we wish him the very best. We both talked on Sunday and we shook hands, and he told me he appreciated it, all I’ve done for him, and I said, ‘Hey, you’ve done the same for me, so we appreciate it.’ It went both ways, and I hope we’ve done good for each other. So that’s where we left it.”

Burns asserted that his decision “didn’t have anything to do” with personality conflicts within the team, noting that “everyone got along great.” There were other factors at play that aren’t for public consumption.

“Just as a businessman, I know that all the car owners that I’ve talked to so far, my close friends and things who have called me and reached out, I’ve explained to them a bit, and they’ve been in the same situation that I have,” Burns said. “I’ve never been in this situation exactly like this (as far as racing), but in my construction company and stuff, I’ve had to let people go that I really, really hated to let go, but I had to make a choice and go forward with things and it was really, really tough.

“This one here, it’s been difficult. I mean, it’s been really, really difficult. It was just a fluke-type deal. I mean, there’s a lot to it. It’s just not one little thing, I’ll put it that way. I’m trying to be as honest as I possibly can without saying a whole lot, because I know that things get out there and misconstrued.

“But that’s what people don’t understand,” he continued. “People that are not in business, people that are not in control of people or have a business themselves, they have no clue of what it takes to run a business and what we as owners of companies and things have to deal with on a day-to-day basis and year-to-year basis and go on forward.”

Burns disagrees with Thornton’s assessment in a press release issued Sunday in which he remarked that Burns expressed “he felt the last few months hadn’t been going in the direction that he envisioned for SSI Motorsports and has decided to hire another driver.”

“The statement that was brought out and presented earlier, with what Ricky said that I was gonna head into a different direction … I mean, if he took it like that, I can’t help that,” Burns said. “It’s not the direction that I wanted to go to for sure. That was absolutely not the truth, because who in their right mind fires a guy who’s had so much success? I mean, if that’s all it was about, was winning a bunch of races and winning a bunch of money, who in their right mind does that? That’s all they wanna live for, that’s all they wanna have their name out there for.

“But as far as what I’m all about and people who know me very well, there’s a few handful who do really know me, car owners and suppliers that supply some of our pieces and parts that know me pretty well, and they know what I’m about. That’s the part that people will never know.”

The X-factor in Burns’s machinations, of course, is O’Neal, the 23-year-old sensation who happens to have a deep history and extremely close relationship with Burns and his wife Vicki. Burns stressed that he does not want O’Neal to be viewed as the “bad guy,” portrayed as coming in behind Thornton’s back angling for the ride after he made his own momentous news in mid-March by quitting the Rocket Chassis house car team following a 2023 season that included the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series championship, a World 100 victory and over $1 million in earnings to launch his own race team. That didn’t happen, Burns insists.

The team owner acknowledged that he considered expanding SSI Motorsports to a two-car effort to bring on O’Neal as Thornton’s teammate after the young Hoosier left the Rocket1 seat, but the talk didn’t become a reality and Burns said it was his idea, not a suggestion from O’Neal.

“The thing was, we thought about starting a two-car team, but there were some issues that didn’t work out,” Burns said. “As a car owner, at that time, Hudson was top two or three in the country as far as coming off (driving) Mark Richards’s (Rocket1) stuff, so what car owner wouldn’t be excited about having two drivers like that in your stable so to speak? You’re thinking, Gosh dang, you’re on top of the world a whole lot. It increases your chances of doing good.

“Whether you’re winning or not, there’s gotta be a loser (in a two-car program) … but you’re still having some success, and to see when you roll into the racetrack and it’s like, ‘Hey, here comes the SSI team. These guys are the guys to beat,’ that was exciting for me to think about at the time.

“It didn’t work out, and that’s OK,” he added. “But I don’t want something written up about Hudson coming in here and undermining, because that was absolutely not the case. In fact, when I made the phone call to Hudson after the fact (releasing Thornton on Sunday), I mean, he had to think about (the ride offer). He didn’t jump at the chance right off the get-go on Monday. He had to think things through before he made a decision.”

There’s no doubt, however, that Burns has a connection to O’Neal dating back to when he was a teenager just beginning to follow in his father Don’s tire tracks. He caught Burns’s eye driving a Crate Late Model at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway, leading to some sponsorship, a ride in Burns’s Crate car and, eventually, O’Neal’s Super Late Model debut in September 2016.

“When he beat up on his uncle (Marty O'Neal) and (multitime Northern Allstars champion) Steve Barnett that night, I was down there watching,” Burns recalled. “He was a 14-year-old kid, pretty good. Then you get to know him and stuff and listen to him … if you just know what kind of person he is and how he handles himself, it was really enlightening, and both me and my wife fell in love with him as a 15-year-old kid when he actually come to drive for us.

“I mean, he lived with me and my wife since he was 15 years old, and raced with us in the Crate stuff and started out in the Late Model stuff. He’s just like my son basically. We’ve kind of mentored him throughout his whole career. We’ve always been close even when I had to let him go.”

Indeed, O’Neal’s first tour of duty with SSI Motorsports ended in late October 2019, barely one month after he had won Brownstown’s Jackson 100. He was 19, already a veteran of three seasons on the Lucas Oil Series and considered one of the sport’s rising stars, when Burns cut him loose. Burns noted that O’Neal still “needed to grow up a little bit” at the time, but the car owner also made the decision with the plan that he would step away from racing and not field a team in ’20.

Burns offered guidance and other assistance to O’Neal as he searched for a new opportunity, which ultimately was the MasterSbilt house car ride to start the 2020 season.

“We talked the whole time through that, where he was going and what he was doing, and talked with his car owners and helped about as much as we could without just going full-bore racing, which we didn’t really want to do at that time,” Burns said.

But after the Covid-19 shutdown in the spring of 2020, Burns decided to rekindle his race team and run select events with Thornton, who had driven for SSI over the final months of the ’18 season when O’Neal was sidelined to undergo shoulder surgery. As Burns watched O’Neal move on to fellow Hoosier Craig Sims’s new PCC Motorsports operation late in the ’20 campaign and then land a full-time gig racing for the Roger Sellers-owned Double Down Motorsports in ’21, he shifted his focus to building a national-level operation with Thornton.

“Hudson kind of established himself with the other team and it was good, so we thought, Well, this would be an opportunity … Ricky’s shown us he can drive a race car a little bit,” Burns said. “He had some learning to do to get a feel for (Late Models), but then it got better and better as the years went on and he become what he is today. He’s learned a lot, and it helped that we got Anthony (Burroughs) on board (as crew chief in August 2021) and the other guys the last two years, and Ricky’s become the driver he is I think with the help of Anthony.”

Burns doesn’t deny that he envisioned someday reuniting with O’Neal.

“Was it a desire?” he said. “Yeah, it was there.”

But Burns thought the possibility of ever having O’Neal as his driver again might have disappeared with his move to the Rocket house car at the end of the 2022 season. O’Neal had sought Burns’s counsel when Richards offered him the ride and Burns told him to go for it.

“We talked a lot before he took the Rocket1 ride, and I said, ‘That’s where you need to be,’” Burns said. “I was very, very supportive of that, because I knew that could be a long-term deal going forward because I knew what kind of driver he was, what he could get accomplished with top-notch equipment and that team. I knew that was gonna be very, very successful for him. I thought, This will be a good fit, a good future for several years to come for him, and Rocket needed a kid like that to come in and be a wheelman and race their cars. He was the perfect fit for him I thought, so I was very supportive of that and looking forward to that for him.

“I thought, Now I can relax and stuff, and if my driver decides to go somewhere … Ricky’s got aspirations to go sprint car racing, so I thought in the back of my mind, I don’t know how much longer I’m gonna have him, and if he goes someplace else and Anthony goes someplace else, then I’m done. I don’t have any desire to have anything more because I’ve had what I wanted, and there’s nobody else out there that’s gonna be what I wanted, to be as organized and be as neat and take care of the equipment like these guys have.”

When Burns learned from O’Neal earlier this year that leaving the Rocket1 seat was “in the back of his mind,” he said, “I knew what could be happening, so I thought, 'Oh, boy.' ”

Burns offered O’Neal sponsorship to get his Hudson O’Neal Racing program underway by late April, including the use of his second hauler and trailer.

“We was going to try and do something together (as a two-car team) but that didn’t work out, people-wise and everything, so we was gonna help him what we could and let him do his thing,” Burns said. “He’s learned a lot in the last two months of doing it, and I’m really jealous of what he’s built on his own in the last two-and-a-half, three months since he left Rocket. We’ve talked a lot about things and he was headed in the right direction.”

Finally, just over two months into O’Neal’s run as an owner-operator, Burns went ahead and hired him as his lone driver. With Burroughs, Williams and Tharp agreeing to stay with SSI Motorsports — and O’Neal bringing his crew member, Nick Hardie, along to add more manpower — Burns feels he has the team in place to maximize O’Neal’s talents.

“Everybody can talk about how hard working the (crew) guys are that they have, and I’m sure there are some other teams that put in the effort and stuff like that, but I know what these guys do here,” Burns said of his crew. “And it doesn’t matter what time of the morning that they get back here at the shop on Sunday or Monday or whatever it is. They’ve got a routine that they do, whose job it is to do stuff … they wash and jump in the trailer to clean it, and then they go to Buffalo Wild Wings that night and relax and they’re back out here on Monday morning at 8 o’clock. Anthony’s here before that, but the others show up at 8 o’clock and they bust their butts until 7, 8 o’clock or whatever depending on what they got going on.

“They’re very, very well organized, and it’s pretty amazing. That’s what I was shooting for all along when I first started this deal and finally I got to this point. We’re not a Rick Hendrick or Joe Gibbs (NASCAR team) or nothing like that well organized, but I’m proud of where we’re at. We’ve built a pretty successful team I think over the last couple three years and I hope it’s gonna continue. We’re not done by no means.”

Continuing SSI’s run of success is “the goal,” Burns said. “We’re optimistic about the rest of the season. We know it’s gonna take a little time (for O’Neal and the crew) to learn and gel and get the feel, but we know what our team’s made of. We know we have a good driver who can wheel a car — I mean, he’s a past champion, for crying out loud. He beat us last year, so we’re jealous of that, to be honest with you. That’s where we want to be at, but we should have the nucleus of the team … they’re all on board 100 percent.

“To be rightfully honest, they’re nervous about the media (attention) this weekend,” he continued, looking ahead to O’Neal’s debut in the SSI Longhorn cars during this weekend’s events on Thursday at 34 Raceway in West Burlington, Iowa, and Saturday at Lucas Oil Speedway in Wheatland, Mo. (Friday’s scheduled stop at Tri-City Speedway in Granite City, Ill., has been postponed.) “That’s what we’re a little bit hesitant or nervous about or whatever, but I’m hoping my driver and stuff can get over that and doesn’t have that pressure affecting him. Hopefully we can muddle through and get through another week or two and get back to normal.”

And Burns will adjust to having O’Neal back in his equipment.

“I had dinner with him a couple weeks ago, to be honest with you, down in Columbus (Ind.),” Burns said of O’Neal. “He come down to watch Austin (Burns’s son) in a demolition derby and we went out to eat afterward, and I said, ‘Hudson, how you doing? What’s it gonna take to get you in this top four (in points) for this (Lucas Oil) championship?’ He said, ‘More track time and seat time and stuff like that.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s great, but hear me one thing — you’re gonna have to quit driving like a car owner.’ ”

He paused, and then, considering his new position as O’Neal’s boss, added with a laugh: “So I told him this afternoon when he was over here at the shop, I said, ‘Forget what I said. Forget driving like a car owner now.’ ”