Ricky Thornton Jr. and his Koehler Motorsports No. 20rt team certainly would’ve liked a smoother start to their 2025 season, but there’s something to be said about how they found victory lane Thursday at All-Tech Raceway.

After struggling in 2025's first three races, including wrecking a race car Jan. 24 at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Fla., the 34-year-old Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series champion and his Mount Airy, N.C.-based operation came together when they needed each other most.

Making an overnight trip to North Carolina after Volusia's Saturday finale, the team rebuilt the its primary Longhorn Chassis in preparation for eight races in 10 days on the Lucas Oil circuit.

Thrashing in an all-hands-on-deck effort that forced the team to complete “two to three weeks worth of work in two-and-a-half days,” Thornton and his crew weren’t only ready for Thursday’s series program at All-Tech, but they looked like a championship unit that couldn’t be stymied.

“It shows how good our team really is,” said Thornton, who earned $10,000 in the All-Tech opener. “Obviously you don’t want stuff like that to happen, but at least we’re in a position, Koehler Motorsports is in a position, that we were able to get it fixed.”

Thornton was aware of the concerns expressed by outsiders, particularly on social media, after his 22nd- and 19th-place finishes to begin the year Jan. 17 at Golden Isles Speedway near Brunswick, Ga. and Jan. 25 at Volusia, where he missed Jan. 24's feature after finding himself in the middle of a three-car pileup in a consolation race.

The Chandler, Ariz., native's first two 2025 feature starts marked only the fourth time since he began campaigning on the Lucas Oil tour in 2021 that he finished 19th or worse in back-to-back features.

Entering his fifth Lucas Oil season as the reigning champ, Thornton’s taking on more the veteran role on his new-look Koehler team after his successful run at SSI Motorsports with crew chief Anthony Burroughs that ended in July.

With three new crewmen adjusting to the touring and road life with the Koehler Motorsports team Thornton joined last summer, the driver has established himself more as a leader in coalescing a crew that's never worked together, much less crewed on a national tour, until this season.

Over the past 12 months, Thornton worked with five crew chiefs: Burroughs (from the start of 2024 through last July 7), Kenny Payton (July 10-25), Chris Madden (July 26-Oct. 19), Ricky Arnold (Oct. 19-Dec. 7), and now 22-year-old Nathan Sletto, a first-time touring crew chief in the Dirt Late Model division.

Though Sletto doesn’t have the experience yet of Lucas Oil’s toughest competitors, Thornton’s always had rapport with his good friend from Brandon, Minn. Sletto, who came on board as a general mechanic at Koehler Motorsports last August, formerly crewed for Thornton years ago during his modified heyday.

Before Jan. 17’s series opener at Golden Isles, Sletto admitted “there’s definitely some pressure there” when succeeding Thornton’s aforementioned and successful crew chiefs, “but I try to keep that out of my head.”

“RTJ and I work well together,” Sletto said. “We communicate. I think it’ll be good. But yeah, definitely some pressure. … The biggest thing is having a good group of guys. If you don’t have a good group of guys gel together, it makes everyone job pretty hard. But once you have your routine down, it’s pretty much straightforward. You just have to learn your car, learn your adjustments, and it’ll be good.”

Of the crew chiefs Thornton had last season, Payton remains involved as a Koehler's shop manager. Thornton’s team brought back general mechanic Zack Frields, who occasionally assisted Thornton during his time at SSI and last season with Koehler. Thornton added tire specialist Skylar Cooper, who replaces D.J. Williams, a key crew member during Thornton’s 34-victories season with SSI in 2023.

“None of us essentially have worked together,” Thornton said of Sletto, Frields and Cooper. “So this win feels really good. It was worth all the 30 hours of labor we did to put the car back together.

“A lot of work. It’s always nice when something like that happens, when you work as hard as you do, and really new guys with us. It’s always good when something does happen like that. We practically built a brand-new car. It’s nice to have the speed we did right away."

Team owner Bobby Koehler has been instrumental, too. When the team returned to Koehler’s Mount Airy, N.C., shop at 8:30 a.m. Sunday, Koehler helped the team strip the damaged race car down and drop the chassis off to Longhorn an hour down the road all before lunchtime.

The crew got the chassis back midday Monday and worked around the clock to have it ready for the first of three nights of action at All-Tech. They departed Mount Airy on Wednesday morning and arrived at the 4/10-mile Florida oval minutes before that evening's practice. Thornton said his team “100 percent” wouldn’t have been ready if not for his team’s relentless effort.

“Without (team owner Bobby Koehler), we wouldn’t be as far where we are now,” Thornton said. “We drove all night after Volusia, nine hours back to the shop. Met us there. Worked at 8:30 a.m. He left Longhorn at 11. The time we weren't working on the car, we washed the other car because we ran it the final night at Volusia.”

Thornton's 40-lap victory Thursday from his eighth starting spot was thanks in part to Devin Moran's late flat tire that allowed a last-lap pass, but tire choice to critical, too.

The team’s decision to employ a harder right-rear tire — an NLMT-3 as opposed to the NLMT-2 that Moran and five-lap leader Shane Clanton had go flat — paid off. Thornton’s ability to go from fifth to second on the final restart with 11 laps remaining, and then from second to the lead after he survived lap-33 contact with the turn-two wall.

“Felt like harder tire was the way to go,” said Thornton, who said he was fortunate to get an outside-row starting spot for the race's lone restart.

“I was praying (Donald) McIntosh was going to pick the bottom because I knew none of those guys were going to run the top,” Thornton said. “Then went fifth to second down backstretch.”

Thornton moved up to pressue Moran, but lost ground in turn two with eight laps remaining because Moran took the air off the nose of his race car, which “that was exactly what he was supposed to do.”

Thornton was too far back to initially see Moran’s tire going flat, but he definitely saw that Clanton’s right-rear giving way on lap 29 when the Georgia driver dropped out of second for the race's lone caution.

“It’s why I love All-Tech,” Thornton said. “You can never count yourself out until it’s over.”

Thornton now owns All-Tech victories in Lucas Oil action for three consecutive seasons — he's the only multiple-time winner on the circuit at the Wendell Durrance-owned track that drivers describe as tricky and technical.

“This is one of the few places you go where the driver is really crucial,” Thornton said. “You can be off a little bit and get up on the wheel. I felt that first half, I wasn’t as good as the guys in front of me. I made stuff happen that I needed to. Put ourselves in a good position. Without that yellow, we probably run fourth, fifth, sixth.”

Simply put, All-Tech brings out Thornton’s best as a racer.

“I feel like All-Tech just fits me,” Thornton said. “You have to be so aggressive here, but so much patience at the same time. You run so hard to get your car turned, but if you overdo it, you’re sideways. It’s so different. It’s like a gray, chalky clay. There’s a couple places, like (Southwest Speedway) in Dickinson, N.D., where they have an identical surface. I ran really good there, and at (Las) Vegas (Motor Speedway), that has a similar surface. This style clay just fits me. There isn’t many racetracks this way, but I love it.”

Despite a turbulent start to the season, Thornton hopes his early victory shows that his new-look team is capable of big things.

“After Golden Isles and Volusia, it wasn’t looking very pretty,” Thornton said. “But it’s nice to do all that hard work and show that our team still can do it.”