Ricky Thornton Jr. was quite busy at The Dirt Track at Charlotte’s World Finals balancing driving duties with his regular Koehler Motorsports No. 20rt team and Bernie Stuebgen’s No. 71 Indy Race Parts sprint car.

The weekend could’ve been far busier for the 34-year-old who contemplated checking off another item off his racing bucket-list: Competing in a big-block modified. Indeed, the Chandler, Ariz., superstar put out some feelers among modified car owners and in return garnered plenty of interest from prospective teams that had quality equipment.

Ultimately, Thornton didn’t want to feel stretched too thin across his Dirt Late Model priorities, trying to get back up to speed in a winged 410 sprint car and potentially having to learn a new race car in the big-block modified. But he also envisions that “I think eventually it could happen” — him competing in one-off big-block modified events like the World Finals.

“The hard part here is, I feel like you have to focus on the Late Model. The sprint car is different that it takes a lot of focus, too,” Thornton said at last week’s World Finals. “I think if I can run a few sprint car races a year and get myself in better condition there, I think maybe you could see me run all three here. But I feel like I need to focus enough on the sprint car right now where if I can make the race, be competitive, and maybe a couple years from now we could do all three.”

Should Thornton ever pull off the trifecta at Charlotte, racing the Late Model, sprint car and modified, he’d need more seat time in the 410 sprint car. He last raced a winged sprint car at last year’s World Finals and the rust certainly showed as Thornton could only finish eighth and ninth in B-mains last Thursday and Friday at Charlotte — four and five spots shy of transferring into the A-main.

Thornton, who comes from a successful IMCA modified background, isn’t afraid to strap himself into different race cars. On Oct. 24-25, he finished fourth and fifth in his first-ever USAC National Sprint Car races at Central Arizona Raceway’s 58th annual Western World Championship, a major event on the non-winged sprint car circuit. He’s also raced a midget, Silver Crown car, and micro sprint this year.

“A lot of people I know run big blocks. Had really good offers, but the hard part would be doing it and making sense,” Thornton said. “I don’t wanna do it just to say I did it. Ideally, it’d be a year we could run all three and somehow win all three. That’d be a cool stat that’d be about impossible to ever do, let alone, it’s tough running two classes. We’ll just kind of wait and see.”