Ricky Thornton Jr. didn’t waste any time in Friday’s Pittsburgher 100 preliminary feature at Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Motor Speedway. Six circuits into the 30-lapper, he was already in the lead with his eyes squarely set on padding his advantage in the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series’s Big River Steel Chase for the Championship. | RaceWire

“I was running hard, but I wasn’t running crazy,” the 35-year-old superstar from Chandler, Ariz., said of his quick surge from the fourth starting spot to the lead. “I just wanted to I wanted to try to get out front and then dictate my own pace, and I felt like I was setting a really good pace.”

Thornton’s next words, however, told the story of his night and, in turn, the Lucas Oil Series title battle.

“Just … unfortunate,” Thornton said.

Thornton spoke dejectedly while standing behind his Koehler Motorsports Longhorn Chassis wearing street clothes, rehashing the exploded right-rear tire that knocked him from the top spot on lap 15 and injected a giant dose of drama into the national tour’s championship race. He was still leading the Big Four standings after rallying from a pit stop to salvage a ninth-place finish, but his 80-point edge entering the weekend was sliced to just five points over Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, who inherited the feature’s lead with Thornton’s trouble and went on to a $10,000 victory.

“It obviously sucks,” said Thornton, who is chasing a second consecutive Lucas Oil Series championship. “I feel like that that was probably our race to lose.”

Moran agreed with Thornton’s assessment. The just-turned-31 driver — he celebrated his birthday Sept. 25 — acknowledged that he caught a huge break to emerge triumphant and erase virtually all of his deficit in the opener of the Pittsburgher 100 weekend.

“Obviously Ricky was better than us so we’re gonna have to work on our race car and get faster,” Moran said. “You never want that to happen to anybody and especially someone you’re trying to battle for the championship. Literally someone said earlier about him getting a flat, and I said, ‘Listen, I just want to beat the guy outright.’ Unfortunately that wasn’t the case tonight, but we did capitalize on his misfortune.”

Hot off a $50,000 victory in last Saturday’s Jackson 100 at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway to cap the opening doubleheader of the five-race Chase, Thornton was on a mission at PPMS. He sailed by Garrett Alberson of Las Cruces, N.M., for third on lap three, passed Brandon Sheppard of New Berlin, Ill., for second the next circuit and slid Moran for the lead entering turn one to assume command on lap six.

Moran immediately knew Thornton was in a league of his own.

“I was like, ‘Oh, s---, he’s winning tonight,’” the pole-starting Moran said. “Like I said, his car is really good. He was driving really, really hard. When we got to lapped traffic I actually got back to him, but in open air his car was definitely really good.”

But Thornton’s right-rear tire didn’t last. Rounding turns one and two on lap 15, the tire let loose. He was able to keep his car off the outside wall as he slowed to bring out a caution flag, but the force of the explosion tore up the right-rear bodywork.

“I just blew the right-rear. Just one of those deals,” Thornton said. “I don’t know if I ran over a rock or something into one, or if it was a slow leak.

“It was weird. Like, we got so high up into the crown (of the track), like, I started tipping a little bit, and then it just blew …like once it went, it pretty much disintegrated. It blew the whole deck out of it, spoiler and everything else. Not good. A lot of work to do tomorrow, body-wise.”

Thornton’s crew, led by head wrench Zach Frields with assistance from tire guy Skyler Cooper and, for the Chase, former Dirt Late Model star Brian Birkhofer, quickly changed the tire and patched up the mangled sheetmetal as best they could. Their frustration was evident when a crew member tossed the wheel and shredded tire to the ground behind the team’s trailer as Thornton headed back on the track.

With just a single caution, on lap 20, over the remaining distance, Thornton did well to reach ninth place in the finishing order. He took the spot on lap 27 from Gregg Satterlee of Indiana, Pa.

Thornton said the body damage “definitely hurt me a little bit, but our stuff was still really good. Missing half a deck and the right-side spoiler, like realistically, you’re probably half a second slower a lap, but I felt like I was still able to keep pace and go forward.”

Just how hard Thornton drove to gain as many positions as he did after the blowout was clear when he returned to his trailer after the race. As he climbed out of his car, smoke was literally wafting off the machine’s right-rear tire, which was worn and, in fact, losing air.

“The (tire) we finished the race on, actually, there was a hole in it,” Thornton said. “Luckily we didn’t have another yellow (over the final 10 laps) or we’d have had another flat.”

Moran wondered afterward if Thornton’s high line around the sprawling half-mile oval contributed to his demise.

“He was, like, all the way up over the crown (of the track) and ripping around there,” Moran said. “Really, he was just going really, really hard, but I mean, his car was really good and he was really fast. But he was actually, like, getting up over them crumbs and like throwing rocks. Like one time I was falling him down the back straightaway and he was throwing rocks and all kinds of stuff, so, he was definitely pushing it hard.”

When asked if he feared suffering a similar fate as Thornton, Moran said he was “a little worried” about blowing a tire, “but not really, because I wasn’t running as high as him. And I was like, ‘Well, Devin, don’t make that mistake. Don’t let that happen.’ So I kind of backed down a little bit and just got rolling.”

Moran relished his victory, which continued his run of success at PPMS in recent years. He won the Pittsburgher’s Friday opener for the second straight year and heads into Saturday’s 70-lap, $50,000-to-win finale having finished second in the event in each of the past two years.

“All of a sudden, I love Pittsburgh,” Moran said. “I came here a lot when I was younger and just never could figure it out. And then, in 2020, I had a chance to win the Pittsburgher and got a flat (after leading laps 1-16 and 36-81), and ever since then we’ve just been really good here.”

“I always liked it, I just never ran good here,” said Moran, who’s in his third season for the Rogers Sellers-owned Double Down Motorsports team. “It’s a track, for how slick it is, you still have to be up on the wheel and you got to have a good race car and everything just got to work out really good. And for some reason, I feel like ever since I’ve gotten with Roger, just everything has worked out really good.”

Of course, Moran’s Hall of Fame father, Donnie, is a two-time Pittsburgher winner (1991, 2005), but the younger Moran said his dad hasn’t been able to transfer all of his PPMS expertise.

“When the cars (evolved), he didn’t really come here a whole lot,” said Moran, whose 63-year-old father made his last Pittsburgher attempt in 2013 (he didn’t qualify). “But he always tells me back in the day how he had the track record at like whatever (the time) was, but it was a wedge car and this and that. I hear about that all the time.”

Buoyed by a perfect night — he earned a 10-point bonus for recording a group fast-time in qualifying — Moran’s mind was looking forward to continuing his run of consistency in pursuit of the Lucas Oil Series title. He’s finished second in each of the Chase’s first two years and wants to gain that one extra spot for the $250,000 championship prize.

“Consistency, that’s what I feel like our team is known for,” said Moran, who began the Chase last weekend with finishes of third and second at Brownstown. “We don’t win 25, 30 races like Bobby (Pierce) and Ricky do, but I feel like night in and night out, we pride ourselves on having really good runs. And ever since, really, right after Huset’s (Speedway’s Silver Dollar Nationals in July), we just figured some things out and just finally started clicking.

“But really, we’ve got to keep a level head. We came out of Pittsburgh last year with the lead in the playoffs and it all fell apart at Brownstown, so it only takes one night for everything to fall apart on a race car.”

Moran has experienced the pressure of a close battle for a championship, but he brushed off any suggestion that those past runs make this one any easier. He is embracing the stress that will come in Saturday’s Pittsburgher and Oct. 17-18’s Chase-ending Dirt Track World Championship at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio.

“I mean, I just put the pressure on myself because I want to do good, you know?” Moran said. “I mean, yeah, I want to do good for Roger, but I want to win a championship on my own, for myself.

“There’s always pressure. It don’t matter if you’re 15, or you’re 55, you put pressure on yourself if you want to be successful. That’s why (technical consultant) Vinny (Guliani) always tells me pressure is a privilege. And yeah, it’s a privilege to have the opportunity to do what we do, and hopefully we can capitalize.”

Moran still has to overcome the slim lead held by Thornton, who is ready for the challenge as well.

“It’s definitely nice to be ahead, but in a normal world, we’d be 300-and-something (points) ahead. So obviously it sucks the way the way the (Chase) format is, but we’re still the point leader,” Thornton said. “We’ll try to win tomorrow, we’ll try to win Eldora, and if we do that, no matter what, we’ll be the point champion.”