Brandon Overton had a disappointing season by most counts. He finished 7th in the Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series points and only won one race at Circle City. Outside of Lucas Oil he only won three other races with two of them coming at East Alabama and the fourth at Volusia Speedway Park during Speed Weeks. It was not the season most expected from Overton when he joined Riggs Motorsports and became the driver of the Longhorn Factory Team and teamed with crew chief Anthony Burroughs.
In an interview on The Dirt Parlor, Overton opened up about his struggles and the difficulties of joining a new team, “What makes it really, really hard is when you put two people-. Obviously, I’ve always worked on my car. Always been in charge of the setup, doing everything. I made all the decisions. [It] come down to me. Well, then you put me in an environment where: ‘All right, Brandon, you just drive. You tell us if it’s loose or tight and you throw your two cents in there and you focus on driving and we got you a badass crew chief.”
“Well, my crew chief has had a lot of success with a different driver,” he continued. “And obviously I don’t drive just like he does and I don’t want to feel what he wants to feel. So it’s taken us a long time to try to get me comfortable. Like he can do the same things that he did with Ricky [Thornton Jr.] or Hud[son O’Neal] and I don’t know. I feel like [expletive]. I don’t know what you want me to do. I’m slow. I can’t drive it. And it’s not neither one of us are wrong or doing the wrong things. So then we’re struggling with that. Trying to get a baseline to get me comfortable.”
“And then we had all the engine troubles,” he added. “We’re blowing up motors left and right and things are happening and that’s adding to it. Adding to the pressure. And then I got all the smart people in my corner. You got all the guys at Longhorn that know, that’ve raced, that’ve been successful. So then they start adding their two cents in. So, then before you know it, we’ve got all these smart people trying to fix the problem and not that it makes it worse, but it kind of does. Like it gets all where none of us feel like we know what we’re doing. Then we lose confidence. It’s just a snowball.”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Overton emphasized. It’s tough, man. And that’s why I say I don’t think people understand. People look at it and say, “He’s got Anthony Burroughs, he’s got Kevin Rumley, he’s got Longhorn, he’s got the best engines, he’s got the most money, he’s got the baddest [expletive] you can get in and he can’t win. He sucks.’ I’ve also won big races with the raggediest [expletive] at the track. It’s not that. It’s just for whatever reason that’s how it goes. If you sit and you’re going to build an all-star team, we have a badass crew chief. We have a great crew. My crew bust their ass. They work hard. We have all the ingredient, but for whatever reason we just didn’t perform. I don’t know. I don’t know why. I wish I did. I think we all wish we did where we could all fix it. It’s like we feud and we hate each other. It’s just damn it’s not going. So we’re trying to get her figured out.”
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Later in the interview, Overton reiterated how different the team setup was with him not working or even living near the car, “It’s just a way different position for me. I’ve never done it like this. So it’s tough on me. I think it’s tough on them. It’s tough on everybody. Like I said you got all the goods to make some cool [expletive] and we can’t get it done.”
He also added, “The car that we drive, it doesn’t have time to work itself out. You’re either going to go or you’re going to get fired. It’s a business. The house car is supposed to beat the customer cars.”
From there, Overton shared how he would like the team to be run, “You build your little team up and you just go race and it’ll just start clicking.”
It appears that Riggs Motorsports will be taking Overton’s advice. Following a report from Justin Fiedler aka Dirtrackr that Riggs Motorsports would no longer be the Longhorn Factory Team, team owner Scott Riggs confirmed it to FloRacing’s Kevin Kovac, “Let me start up by saying (Longhorn’s) Steve (Arpin) and I are still good friends, so nothing happened there. It’s not a blow up. It’s simply that they want to go a different route on their (chassis) development program instead of using a team that goes on the road and tries to win races, which is probably the right way to do it and I totally get it.”
“And for us, we’re racers, we’re going to race, and we’re going to keep our Riggs Motorsports brand going,” he continued. “We’re going to continue to buy their (Longhorn) product and race their stuff and hopefully get help from them, which they said, ‘No problem.’ But we kind of want to be on our own.”
Additionally, Riggs shared that the team will shift its headquarters from China Grove, North Carolina to near Overton’s home in Georgia. Overton will also take a more “active day-to-day role” according to Kovac.
Riggs also confirmed that crew chief Anthony Burroughs and crew member Jason Tharp “tendered their resignations last week.” That was also reported by Dirtrackr, who shared last week, “Anthony Burroughs and Justin Tharp have departed the 76 team in recent days. … But Burroughs and Tharp already have their next deal. This one might surprise you a bit, but Burroughs and Tharp are heading for a reunion with a driver they had a lot of success with previously when they were all at SSI Motorsports together. And that driver, as I’m sure you could have guessed by now, is Ricky Thornton Jr.”
While Burroughs and Tharp have left the team, Ryan Cantillo, the team’s third crew member, will remain and relocate to Georgia. He will be joined by two new full-time members who were not announced.
“We’re all disappointed with the year we had, and I just think that, you know, sometimes, it just doesn’t work out for whatever reason,” Riggs concluded. “But I think Brandon’s ready to dig in, and we’re as excited as we were last year when they all came in. We’ve got great motors, we’ve got great cars, everything we have is really good stuff. We’re looking forward to a new direction.”
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