If there’s a driver on the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series happy to put 2024 in the rear-view mirror, it’s Hudson O’Neal.

From the 24-year-old Martinsville, Ind., driver's shocking departure of the Rocket Chassis house car last March … to contemplating a sabbatical from racing before starting his own team last April … to replacing Ricky Thornton Jr. at SSI Motorsports in July, the twists and turns that O'Neal navigated last season were well-documented.

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The 2023 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series champion’s season was highly scrutinized as he missed the tour’s Big Four playoffs and lost ultra-successful crew chief Anthony Burroughs, who’s moved over to the Longhorn Factory Team with Brandon Overton. All that said, O’Neal, who’s chasing his second Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series title this year, welcomes the 2025 season with open arms.

“Absolutely. It was a tough year to say the least. I made a lot of big decisions,” O’Neal said Thursday at Golden Isles Speedway, one day before he retired early in the Lucas Oil opener. “Leaving Rocket and shutting down my team to be part of SSI Motorsports, those were all very, very hard decisions and tough things to do. It’s definitely nice coming into this year with a really nice, solid foundation, and not having to worry about life and racing. Everybody we have on board this year, I think it’s going to be a fun year.”

Of course, this time last year O’Neal entered the new season bearing lofty expectations as the second-year Rocket Chassis house car driver off the strength of his fruitful 2023 season where he reaped his first Lucas Oil title, more than $1 million in earnings and World 100 triumph.

O’Neal’s crew at SSI Motorsports this year doesn’t have the flashy names like Mark Richards nor Burroughs headlining his race-day operation, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t expecting anything less. Nick Hardy officially takes over as O’Neal’s crew chief this year and has been a constant throughout O’Neal’s hectic ride-shuffling journey since last spring.

The 39-year-old Hardy, who previously crewed for Daulton Wilson’s Ratliff Racing team in 2023 and Pageland, S.C.’s Michael Brown in 2021-22, started working for O’Neal last April when he launched his own team. O’Neal also lost crewman Justin Tharp, who’s followed Burroughs over to the Longhorn Factory Team. But he’s hired a pair of young, determined crewmen in 20-year-old Riley Sheedy, who’s getting his first crack crewing full-time, and 23-year-old Logan Scott, who’s worked for Boom Briggs the last two years and traveled with Josh Richards during the Shinnston, W.Va. driver’s last full-time series run in 2022.

“We’re going to try and build our program back,” O’Neal said. “We lost a key component with Burroughs, but all in all, I think we have everything we need.”

Unlike last year, O’Neal firmly believes has the stability to sustain him well into his prime. His relationship with SSI Motorsports owners Todd and Vicki Burns gives him that confidence, a certainty that this time around, in his second stint with the SSI team and fourth team since 2022, will be decisively different.

The Morgantown, Ind.-based SSI operation gave O’Neal his first national touring gig from 2017-19, but cut ties with the then 17-year-old O’Neal, which in hindsight says that “was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.” Up to that point, the son of Dirt Late Model Hall of Fame driver Don O’Neal had never faced that kind of adversity.

"Splitting ways with SSI and having a little bit of a wakeup call, I was just a young kid that had kind of everything at the top level,” O’Neal said. “I needed to know what it was like to have a little bit of a shock and not have absolutely everything. I think I’m a better person for it now. It’s kind of a full-circle moment with Todd. With the unfortunate happenings of Ricky and Todd earlier in the year, I was in the right spot at the right time, and in a weird spot in my career. Everything just worked out.”

From 2020 through 2022, when O’Neal raced the MasterSbilt house car and for Double Down Motorsports, O’Neal “kept a great relationship” with the Burns family, and while he uses the word “fired” when describing his release from SSI in ’19, “the split was calm,” he added.

“I think Todd Burns saw that I needed to grow up and mature, and all those things,” O’Neal said. “I think the biggest thing was, whenever I went there, I started racing Crate cars in 2016, and it was great equipment all the way to Supers up through 2019. So, I had the best equipment, a nice hauler. I just had the best of a little bit of everything.”

O’Neal doesn’t want people to think that an attitude of entitlement is why he was first released from SSI in 2019, saying that “I wasn’t necessarily spoiled from a personality standpoint, I was spoiled from an opportunity standpoint.” In essence, O’Neal “needed to go and have my trials and tribulations, and have the low times in order to become a better person and racer, and have more appreciation for life and everything.”

And he insists that “it was the best thing that ever happened to me was getting let go from there.” O’Neal would say that starting his own team from scratch last April, off the heels of his Rocket1 Racing departure, “was the second-best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Being able to look at the bottom line every week and see the money side of things,” O’Neal started, “look at how much this sport costs, that was probably the next best thing because now I appreciate every dollar, I appreciate every dollar that goes into this, and how hard it is to create a successful team and good program. That’s what SSI Motorsports is.”

O’Neal isn’t speaking hyperbolic when saying he considered dropping off the Lucas Oil tour last year to take a hiatus from racing. 

“I absolutely thought about taking some time off. Whenever I decided I was going to step away from Rocket, I did it without having any type of plan at all,” O’Neal said. “My deal with Kevin Rumley (last March) was kind of a come-up deal. (Rumley) called me up whenever he heard the news and just said, ‘Hey, man, if something happens and if you need a fill-in, call me and we can keep you going until you figure something out.’ It’s just blossomed from there. Without him, I probably would’ve never started my own team (from April through beginning of July). He helped me out a lot and tried leading me in the right direction.”

O’Neal isn’t making it his mission this year to right any misconceptions among rumors because he’s learned that “no matter how much you try to tell the right story, the people are gonna tell the story they want to tell, no matter what you put out there.” Some of the sport’s top, younger talent, like Thornton and Devin Moran, are active users of social media, but O’Neal has steered clear of social platforms because he finds peace away from the internet.

“The rumors, man, there was no substance to them. It’s crazy what people come up with and what people say, and everything else,” O’Neal said. “Yeah, I just wish people would have a little bit of humility and, you know, know a little bit before they spread rumors because it affects everybody, you know what I mean? The amount of phone calls I get from people that are important around our program that call and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ It really does affect everybody. 

“A lot of it’s been from the up-and-down year I guess you could say. There’s just been a lot of unknowns. There’s just been so much negative talk surrounding my name and everything this year, and it sucks because 99 percent of it isn’t true. I just wish (people) would come and talk to me and get to know me before they had an opinion. Unfortunately that’s not the way the world works.

“Unfortunately, I gave them the ammo to use it a little bit the past year, so hopefully, for many more years to come, we don’t give them anymore ammo to fire at us.”

O’Neal did end his tumultuous 2024 year with some good news with his engagement to Tessa Simms, his girlfriend of six-and-a-half years. The two got engaged on New Year’s Eve and look forward to a wedding sometime in October.

“That’s been a long time coming. We’ve been through a lot together, ups and downs, highs and lows, good times and bad times, and everything in between,” O’Neal said. “It’s awesome to be able to call her my fiancee and we’re looking forward to getting married.”

With his longterm ride solidified for the future, and a wedding to look forward to this fall, life is pretty good to start 2025 for O’Neal.

“I think SSI is going to be a home for me for a long, long time,” O’Neal said. “No matter what’s happened the last couple years of my career, I think I’m in a really good spot with a lot of really good people around me. I don’t think my racing career has ever been healthier than it is right now.”