ROSSBURG, Ohio — All Ricky Thornton Jr. wanted to do in Saturday's General Tire Dirt Track World Championship presented by ARP was avoid the self-inflicted wound that knocked him from Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series championship contention in last year’s event at Eldora Speedway.

Then lap 71 of the 100-lap feature happened.

“I almost kind of did the same thing tonight,” Thornton said with a sense of dread.

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The 34-year-old superstar from Chandler, Ariz., spoke from a position of happiness, standing alongside his Koehler Motorsports Longhorn Chassis in Eldora’s pit area after having finished third in the DTWC to clinch his first-ever Lucas Oil Series title in the finale of the national tour’s five-race Big River Steel Chase for the Championship playoff. He knew, however, how close he had come to heartbreaking disaster for the second straight year.

With the 50-point lead in the standings Thornton carried into the DTWC requiring him to finish sixth to secure the championship if either Blairsville, Ga.’s Jonathan Davenport or Dresden, Ohio’s Devin Moran — the two drivers tied for second place behind him in the Chase battle — claimed the race’s $100,000 top prize, he found himself sitting pretty when Davenport retired with terminal engine trouble on lap 64 just as he had passed Tim McCreadie of Watertown, N.Y., for the lead. Moran was still back in seventh amid his march forward from the 18th starting spot so Thornton felt he could take a bit more aggressive approach in pursuit of winning his second career DTWC trophy.

“I was looking at the (video) board,” said Thornton, who previously captured the DTWC in 2021 when it was contested at Portsmouth (Ohio) Raceway Park. “It sucked J.D. had his problems — obviously you wanna race it out the best you can — (but) after that I was able to look at the board and see Devin (a few) spots behind and I’m like, ‘All right, I got a little bit of a buffer.’

“And then I hit the wall and I was like, ‘I might have just thrown this thing out the window,’ ” he said. “I was just trying really hard to win the race, and then I got in the wall and screwed the right-rear spoiler and all that up.”

Thornton bounced hard into the thick cushion between turns one and two as he was stepping up his bid to grab the lead from McCreadie, the other driver in the Big Four playoff field though he wasn’t in contention for the title because of his 155-point deficit. The miscue caused Thornton’s car to push and he scraped the outside wall in turn two, throwing up sparks as he sawed at the steering wheel to regain control.

Once Thornton gathered himself on the backstretch, he had lost significant ground to McCreadie. His mindset also abruptly changed, which was evident he ceded second to eventual winner Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., on lap 75 and didn’t attempt to keep pace with him.

“Then I was like, ‘All right, just finish,’ ” said Thornton, who initially feared that he had cut down his machine’s right-rear tire when mangled its right-rear quarterpanel against Eldora’s concrete. “Our car was really good. I don’t know if we were better than Bobby, but at least before I hit the wall I felt like I could move around and do what I needed to do (to win). After I hit the wall, it was like, ‘Man, just hang onto it and try to run top-five.’ ”

Thornton did just that, carefully negotiating the remaining circuits to preserve a third-place finish. He won the championship by 60 points over Moran, who finished fourth en route to his second consecutive runner-up placing in the Lucas Oil Series standings.

The utter dejection that Thornton felt one year ago at Eldora after seeing his historically prolific season on the Lucas Oil tour disintegrate in the then best-finish-wins, single-race playoff due to an early incident was righted. He finally finished the job — and in truly satisfying and unprecedented fashion after his chances seemed so bleak when his 2024 campaign was turned upside down in early July by his shocking, sudden release from Todd Burns’s SSI Motorsports operation as he held a solid points lead and already had 11 victories on the circuit.

With just two victories for Koehler Motorsports before the Chase’s start, Thornton didn’t seem to have momentum on his side entering the playoffs. He maintained the points lead until the Chase reset but was still less than three months into a hasty ramp up to national-level racing with Bobby Koehler’s Mount Airy, N.C.-based team — one that included the late-July hiring of veteran South Carolina racer Chris Madden as crew chief — so uncertainty surrounded his chances.

Thornton understood why so many observers considered him an underdog for the championship. He and his team used that as fuel.

“I feel like everyone kind of doubted us,” Thornton said. “Coming into this whole playoff deal, I think they wrote us off as fourth, so overall it’s kind of awesome just to come back and have a last couple weeks like we did. Obviously we wanted Pittsburgh (third- and sixth-place finishes to start the Chase on Oct. 4-5) to be a little bit better, but overall it worked out and we ended up champions.

“I’d say obviously the biggest thing is (it took) a lot of work and determination, not only by me but my whole crew. A lot of stuff was thrown at us this year and just to be able to come out on top is pretty awesome.”

Thornton considered his championship run, which picked up steam with a win and runner-up finish in Oct. 11-12’s Jackson 100 weekend at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway, as being wholly unlikely. A driver doesn’t expect to lose his powerhouse ride at midseason and then pick up another within days that will keep him rolling.

“I honestly had no idea what I was gonna do,” Thornton said, thinking back to his release from SSI Motorsports. “It happened Sunday night (July 7), and I think I went to the (Castrol) Flo race Monday or Tuesday and ran for (Brandon Sheppard). At that same time, Bobby (Koehler) was actually one of the first people I talked to.

“What really led me to come to this team was … first, I wanted to make sure if I did come here, it wasn’t gonna affect (Koehler driver) Jimmy (Owens) at all. I’m like, if I’m gonna do something, you don’t ever wanna kick your hero out of his own ride.

“I talked to (Koehler) and we didn’t know exactly what we were gonna do. He’s like, ‘I got my boy’s car (22-year-old Jordan Koehler), we got his rig. We can at least get going.’ And the big thing that stood out to me was, instead of, ‘Hey, we can get through these next couple weeks,’ it was, ‘What do we gotta do to finish the year?’ That was the biggest thing for me.

“And obviously Longhorn and Bilstein (Shocks), they were all super on-board right away too … like, ‘What do we have to do to get through this year? We wanna make this happen.’

“Obviously our goal was to try and still win the championship at that point, and really, you just never know trying to put together a brand-new team in a short amount of time,” he continued. “For it to end like this, it’s kind of a Cinderella story for us.”

Thornton was simply amazed by how everything came together.

“It’s wild,” Thornton said. “Luckily I get to keep the points, otherwise, on that side, we could’ve been, like, season over, start all over. We kept our head down and got through that first Iowa-Nebraska swing (with Koehler in July) and just tried to minimize our points loss, that way whenever it did come down to the top four we knew we’d still be in the Chase and have an opportunity to try and compete for a championship.

“There’s been so much in the shop, at home, down the road. Chris (Madden) has been awesome to work with. Obviously (Madden’s crewman) Ricky Arnold coming over helped a ton, and having D.J. Tires (D.J. Williams, Thornton’s tire guy at SSI Motorsports) back with us … it’s been pretty awesome.”

As Thornton thanked his car owner and crew and all his supporters for believing in him and celebrated the $200,000 title, the two drivers he vanquished in the points race mourned their fates. Davenport was especially disappointed after calmly working his way into the lead in another crown jewel at Eldora but then suffering a crushing engine-related DNF in the DTWC for the second straight year.

“It didn’t shake, it didn’t sputter. It didn’t do s---,” Davenport said, shaking his head at his abrupt departure from the feature. “It just blowed up. As soon as I lifted (entering turn one on lap 64) it broke. It’s either a rod, a rod bolt or crank. That’s one of the three things it could be.”

Davenport, 40, said the powerplant was the same piece he’s has in his cherished Eldora-dedicated Longhorn Chassis since its debut in 2021, but it had been completely rebuilt after it burnt up in last year’s DTWC because a mud clod had punched a hole in the radiator.

“I think the only thing really left of it (from when it was new) was the valve covers, the intake and the crank,” said Davenport, who has never won the DTWC in 14 career feature starts.

While Davenport knew that even if he won the DTWC he would need Thornton to slip back in the finishing order to also bring him the championship, he had himself in position to put the pressure on RTJ. His race had gone almost precisely to his liking.

“I was just kind of pacing myself,” said Davenport, who started fifth, directly behind Thornton. “I passed Timmy for the lead early (laps 3-5) and then the top got rolling, so I was like, ‘Well, let’s kind of chill out right here in second.’ Ricky showed me his nose a couple times so I picked the pace up, and I was just kind of moving around, just biding my time through lapped traffic.

“Then it was about that time. The tires were starting to go, and Timmy had been running the top pretty hard down there so I’d say his left-rear was dying, so I could get a pretty good run off the corner on him. I just got the opportunity to go by him and blowed up after that.”

Davenport slowed to bring out a caution flag and his car was pushed back to his trailer parked inside turns one and two, oil trailing it all the way. He sat in his car for a moment and then climbed out. His buddy and fellow Lucas Oil Series regular, Boom Briggs of Bear Lake, Pa., who didn’t qualify for the feature, immediately handed Davenport a bottle of Busch Light to help drown his sorrows.

“He figured I needed one,” quipped Davenport, who spent the remainder of the race standing alone on the roof of his trailer,

The 30-year-old Moran, meanwhile, was surprisingly upbeat after advancing from deep in the field to finish fourth. He never threatened to win the race — he only reached fourth on lap 94 — but it was a satisfying turnaround from his subpar heat-race run on Friday.

“Just kudos to my crew guys Chuck (Kimble) and Vinnie (Guliani),” said Moran, who fell one spot shy of matching his career-best DTWC finish achieved one year ago when he placed third after losing the championship to Hudson O’Neal’s last-lap pass. “I just said, ‘Here, you guys do something with this and I’ll try to drive it as hard as I can,’ and they did a good job.

“I felt like we were pretty decent, but I still had to use spots in the track that I didn’t want to use. So we were good, but not where we quite needed to be out there.”

Moran was more frustrated by how his season-long consistency slipped slightly during the Chase.

“Just the last couple weeks we were awful early in the night,” said Moran, who led the standings by 10 points over Davenport and 60 over Thornton entering Brownstown’s weekend. “At Brownstown (Sept. 25’s Castrol FloRacing Night in America event) we were no good early, and at Pittsburgh we were no good early, and then we went back to Brownstown and were still no good early. And this week we were no good early, so I had to just pass too many cars to be a championship caliber race car.

“We gotta go back and look at our notes and figure out what the problem was and get it fixed for next year.”

Moran will still collect a hefty points-fund check of $150,000 for his second-place finish in the standings, but that fact offered him little consolation.

“It ain’t really about the money,” said the driver of the Roger Sellers-owned Double Down Motorsports Longhorn Chassis. “I wanted to win that championship.”

That honor went to Thornton, who certified his status as a Dirt Late Model titan with his championship season.

“I feel like I kind of have to be a Late Model guy now with having a title,” said Thornton, who is still relatively new to full-time Dirt Late Model action after cutting his teeth in the open-wheel modified class. “You know, I’ve won a bunch of championships growing up — stocks cars, mods, a few different small Late Model stuff. But I never had a national Late Model championship, so for my first one to be with a series that I’ve watched forever, and to be able to be teammates with my hero growing up … overall, it’s pretty awesome.”