Rick Burbridge Ready for Fresh Start with the OSCAAR Modifieds

After racing a late model for the past 10 years, Rick Burbridge is ready for a change in his racing career. 

It’s why over this past off-season, he purchased a modified to race with the Overkill Enterprise OSCAAR Modifieds in 2026. 

“It's obviously all new for us switching from the late model to the modified so excited to kind of see how we stack up when we come right out of the gate,” Burbridge commented. “There's some rules differences that are more limiting in what we can do with the suspension than we could do in the late model. So that'll be a bit of an adjustment. But hopefully, once we get kind of our arms around that, that'll be good. Just excited to see where we're at compared to everybody else. Just to start and what kind of improvements we can make as we go.”

Burbridge has always shown interest in being involved with the modifieds, dating back to when he was racing thunder cars. Both him and his dad took a serious look back about the modifieds being the logical next step for his racing career. However, an opportunity to drive a late model for someone changed that trajectory.   

“That kind of set us down the path of the first three or four years of my late model career in a car owned by someone else,” he explained. “Then from there, we just kind of continued on to the late model. So the last couple of years weren't great results-wise, and I wasn't having a lot of fun anymore, so I kind of decided I was done with late models at least for a while. It didn't take long for the modified to come back to the top of the list as something to try next.”

Burbridge is planning to run as much of the tour schedule as he possibly can this season, including being excited about returning to Peterborough Speedway this summer.

“I think I haven't been there since 2018 or 2019 with the late model with the APCC Series,” Burbridge revealed. "It's just a track that I felt comfortable with right out of the gate. It's unique in the amount of speed it has for its size relative to the other smaller tracks around here. I've kind of felt comfortable every time we go there.”

For Burbridge, his start in motorsports came through his family in watching both father, uncle, and his older brother race.

“I've just kind of always been around it my whole life and then when I was 19 or 20, my mom got my dad a thunder car partially built for his 50th birthday,” Burbridge said. “So he and I spent about a year and a bit finishing that and the plan was to drive kind of fifty-fifty between each other. Then when we got close to finishing it, he just decided I was going to drive it all the time. I found myself with a full-time thunder car ride.”

Racing the No. 2 for his career seemed like an easy decision at that point, as it was a number he had used in other sports he played prior to racing. 

“I wore number two for a lot of the years of playing hockey, growing up, and number two was mostly the number I used my whole time playing baseball,” he revealed. “So it just kind of felt like the natural number to carry over and do a new sport when I started with the racing.” 

As he alluded to, the success in thunder cars translated into a full-time late model ride in the inaugural season of the APC Auto Parts United Late Model Series. Running all of the events from 2015 through half of 2018 brought a lot of memories for Burbridge which still stand out till this day.  

“Just that first year going to a view of those initial events, that the sheer number of cars and the excitement because it was so new to everyone,” he recalled. “We went to Sunset for that first race - I'd never been to Sunset before on the track. It was only the start of my second year in late models; I had just run the one year at Flamboro, and there were something like 37 cars or something that showed up to that first series race at Sunset. 

“I was literally the last qualifier in from the last chance race, running around the last two laps of that LCQ thinking, ‘I'm totally in a spot where I could get dumped here for the last spot in the future’. But we snuck in and we finished 11th, and those first couple of years of APC were pretty fun.”