ROSSBURG, Ohio — Ricky Thornton Jr. and Bobby Pierce entered Eldora Speedway’s Dirt Late Model Dream weekend as two of the favorites to take home the $100,000 top prize on Saturday night.
If Thursday’s action in the 50-lap preliminary feature is any indication, the duo should be right in the thick of things on Saturday night.
Thornton led early but was passed by Pierce on lap 16, who then built a lead of more than a three seconds, before his car went up in smoke on lap 38 ending his night and handing the lead back to Thornton.
“I didn’t know anything was wrong until bam – it broke,” Pierce said. “It was not a part failure, it was on our own doing. [It was] the oil cooler cover. When we’re warming up these engines, we’ve got something over the oil cooler, the warmup board in front of the radiator, and both of those get taken out. It got missed.
“Nine times out of 10, I freakin’ see it, make sure it gets taken off. It just so happened I never even looked.”
Thornton led the remaining 12 laps, holding off defending World 100 champion Hudson O’Neal on a lap-47 restart to claim the $25,000 top prize.
“(Pierce) blew by me there and pulled away from us,” Thornton said. “But then I thought we were starting to come back to him, and I really thought I had a chance to catch him but we will never know. Catching and passing him are two different things. I hate it for him and his guys, but they’ll still be factor on Saturday.”
In the new format for the event this year, all of Thursday’s competitors now take a night off and the other half of the 99 entrants will compete on Friday night, meaning Thornton is now done racing until his heat race on Saturday night when he takes another shot at his first major Eldora win.
“We’ve got really good speed and the car felt really good tonight,” Thornton said. “Hopefully we will be this good on Saturday night. If we are, I think we will have a shot at it. You can win a lot of races over and over, but until you win here you still have a box to check.”
O’Neal started 15th and methodically worked his way forward moving into the top five on lap 30 and had moved to second place when the caution flag flew on lap 47 when Shannon Babb slowed on the frontstretch with a flat tire.
“I didn’t get near as good of a start there with three to go as I did earlier and I was a little worried about Huddy or Josh sliding me,” Thornton said. “I figured if I just kept running the top even if they did slide me, I would be able to turn back under them.”
O’Neal saw the opening but decided to play it safe.
“He spun his tires there on the restart and maybe I should have tried to slide him,” O’Neal said. “There just wasn’t much to lean on up there in turn two and I didn’t really want to put us both in a bad spot and take a chance of tearing up a really good car. We had dug out of a big hole after qualifying and I didn’t want to throw it all back away.”
Josh Rice started beside Thornton on the front row and drove a steady race coming home in third.
“We got to be happy with that,” Rice said. “We just do this as a hobby so to run up here with these guys says a lot about my guys. We found a power steering leak right before we went for the feature. We filled it up but it had all ran out and it was a handful there at the end. We didn’t have anything for those two, so we are really happy with third.”
Chris Madden, the runner-up finisher in the last three Dream main events, advanced 10 positions and finished in fourth, while Max Blair completed the top five.
Thornton topped the 49-car field in qualifying turning a lap of 15.259 seconds around the high-banked, one-half mile oval.
The finish:
Feature (50 Laps): 1. 20RT-Ricky Thornton Jr[2]; 2. 71-Hudson O’Neal[15]; 3. 11R-Josh Rice[1]; 4. 44-Chris Madden[14]; 5. 111-Max Blair[11]; 6. 25-Shane Clanton[19]; 7. 40B-Kyle Bronson[8]; 8. 97-Cade Dillard[6]; 9. 1-Tim McCreadie[5]; 10. 76-Brandon Overton[7]; 11. 0-Scott Bloomquist[10]; 12. 18D-Daulton Wilson[3]; 13. 93-Carson Ferguson[12]; 14. 96-Tanner English[13]; 15. 28-Dennis Erb Jr[22]; 16. 18-Shannon Babb[23]; 17. 79-Donald McIntosh[20]; 18. 10-Joseph Joiner[17]; 19. 6L-Dustin Linville[21]; 20. 31AUS-Kye Blight[16]; 21. 17SS-Brenden Smith[18]; 22. 32-Bobby Pierce[4]; 23. 22-Chris Ferguson[9]; 24. 95-Jerry Bowersock[24]
