Hudson O’Neal was running second. The driver he replaced last month as driver for SSI Motorsports, Ricky Thornton Jr., was third and itching to move up.

But the battle of the two closely-connected rivals ceased before it could really heat up in Saturday’s 50-lap Rumble by the River finale at Port Royal Speedway. Thornton’s turn-four slider on lap 18 resulted in contact that ultimately knocked O’Neal from contention and inflicted body damage to Thornton’s Koehler Motorsports car that likely contributed to him settling for a runner-up finish behind $50,000 winner Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga.

The possibility of conflict between the racers factoring into the incident certainly was considered by observers, but alas, there was no apparent fallout. Neither driver expressed anger following the race nor did they direct especially derogatory words toward the other.

“Just … misjudged slider, that was all it was,” O’Neal, 23, of Martinsville, Ind., said after rallying from a lap-24 pit stop to change a flat left-front tire and mend twisted body panels for a seventh-place finish. “It happens.”

Thornton, 33, of Chandler, Ariz., offered a slightly stronger take, but he still made his comment with a smile rather than a stern visage.

“I don’t know, he blocked me two or three times, and then the one time he blocked me I about wrecked, and I’m like, ‘All right, the next chance I get I’m just gonna slide him,’ ” Thornton said. “I think he thought that he was gonna be able to drive back around me (with a crossover move) and my right-rear just caught his left-front.”

It undoubtedly was a critical — and wild — moment in the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series-sanctioned race. O’Neal had just peaked to the inside of Davenport on a lap-16 restart and Thornton was pressing to put himself in position to challenge the leader with the halfway point approaching.

Thornton made his bid for second entering turn three on lap 18, surging hard to the inside of the half-mile oval. He slid up the track in turn four, however, and contact with O’Neal resulted, causing Thornton to get squirrelly momentarily and O’Neal to lurch completely sideways and clip the outside wall with his car’s right-rear corner before continuing on.

“I don’t know,” Thornton said when asked about his aggressive move. “It’s time to go at that point. I knew once we got to traffic it was really gonna be the only way I could get by J.D.”

While the right-rear corner of Thornton’s Longhorn Chassis mount was thoroughly crushed from the scrape — spoiler mangled, deck pushed up — he was able to race on and held second place the rest of the way. O’Neal, meanwhile, sported significant left-side body damage on his Longhorn machine that led to him falling to fifth place before he slowed with a left-front flat tire to draw a caution flag on lap 24.

“It was right in the A-pillar,” O’Neal said of the hit from Thornton. “The door shoved back and up and everything. Thankfully, it was all body, and the impact wasn’t hard. It was just more of, like, somebody kind of grabbing you by your shirt, you know what I mean? 

“We were lucky we were able to save it. I thought I was gonna back into the fence or get hit.”

O’Neal soldiered on with his car’s aerodynamics extremely compromised. His left-front tire also began to deflate.

“I think it broke the valve stem out of it where his body panels got up in there,” O’Neal said of his left-front tire. “I thought it was getting low. I would get off of the corner and it would bottom the frame out. I thought about maybe trying to run it (with the flat to the finish), but then I thought, Man, I’m probably gonna be even worse, so I better just pit and try and drive back up through there.”

O’Neal managed to climb forward to finish seventh, keeping him fourth in the Lucas Oil Series points standings by a slight 15 points over fifth-place finisher Tim McCreadie of Watertown, N.Y., with three points races remaining before the cutoff for the seven-race playoffs. But the defending winner of Port Royal’s 50-grand special understood he had a golden opportunity slip through his fingers for the second straight evening. 

“It sucks,” said O'Neal, who a night earlier finished third after briefly leading before tangling with a slower car. “Last night I didn’t do my job and cost us one, and we get here to today and put ourselves in good position and felt like we were doing the right things to be there at lap 50 and just … circumstances.

“We had a really good race car. I felt like we were gonna be able to maintain there, and I was trying to bide my time just a little bit to have something left right there at the end because we were running around that top and I was trying to conserve my left-rear a little bit. I just never got the opportunity to use it.

“It hurts, but at the end of the day we have speed and I think we’ll showcase it here the next several weeks,” he added. “We just gotta keep our head down and bad luck is gonna swing past us eventually. Right now it’s plaguing us.”

Thornton’s hopes for his third full-field victory since joining Bobby Koehler’s North Carolina-based racing operation last month were hampered by the run-in with O’Neal as well. His “really, really good car” wasn’t quite the same because of the rear body damage, though he did an admirable job to compensate for the lack of spoiler that plays a major role in a driver’s success on a high-speed track like Port Royal.

“It loosened you up quite a bit,” Thornton said. “I was a little loose after that, but then I figured out how I needed to run and I was able to slowly get back to (Davenport). It was just tough — we never really had a long enough run where we really got to traffic. For like the first five laps or so on a restart, he could kind of get out and then I could slowly start reeling him back in.”

Thornton ducked underneath Davenport entering turn three on laps 43 and 44, raising the possibility that he might be able to pull off a triumph with his battered car.

“I got under him just to kind of let him know like, ‘Oh s---, maybe I need to move around a little bit,’ ” Thornton said. “But he’s smart enough. He knew he had to stay around the top. I figured if I could move down and maybe get a good launch … like the first time I moved down I felt like I stayed right with him, so I thought I could maybe work the middle a little bit and try to maintain at least and then try to do something in turn one.

“I just never could get close enough to be able to do that,” he continued. “We’re so close to the wall through one and two, if he moved down half a car it affected me more than anything. He almost had to hit a perfect lap for me to hit a perfect lap just aero-wise.”

Everything became a moot point for Thornton on lap 45 when he stumbled rounding the top of turns one and two and then did the same at the other end of the track, twice hitting the fence and costing him an enormous chunk of real estate that resulted in him losing Davenport by 4.234 seconds.

“I got the wall with about five to go and then it was over,” Thornton said. “I just got the right-front in the wall. I don’t know if I bent a shock or something like that, but that was it for us.”

It was nevertheless a solid weekend for Thornton and his Chris Madden-led crew. He entered the doubleheader leading the Lucas Oil Series standings by 245 points over Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, and ended it was a still healthy edge of 225 points over Davenport.

“Overall, big shout out to my crew,” Thornton said. “They’ve been busting their butts, getting better and better. I felt like we had a good car last night and just made the wrong decision. Tonight I felt like we picked the right tire and I think our car was really good but this big damage early didn’t really help.”