Gateway Top Five Caps Strong Regular Season For Love

Jesse Love (2) leads a pack of cars Saturday at World Wide Technology Raceway. (Nigel Kinrade/NKP photo)

MADISON, Ill. – Richard Childress Racing’s Jesse Love ended the NASCAR Xfinity Series regular season with a fifth-place finish Saturday night at World Wide Technology Raceway.

The 20-year-old from Menlo Park, Calif., climbed from 18th on the starting grid at the 1.25-mile oval and never ran lower than he qualified all night in the Nu Way 200 Sauced by Blues Hog.

Love cracked the top 10 prior to the end of the first 35-lap stage and earned points in both segments, but it was a fortuitous choose during the fourth caution period of the race that allowed Love to get to the front row and briefly do battle with his longtime friend and rival Connor Zilisch.

Racing as high as he had all night, Love tussled on the bottom lane at Gateway, but couldn’t do enough to get the top spot from a dominant Zilisch – who ultimately led 121 of 160 laps on his way to a ninth win of the year.

Love, meanwhile, was swallowed up during the penultimate restart after William Sawalich – one of several drivers who needed a win to make the playoffs – stuffed him into the middle of three-wide entering turn one.

That shuffled Love back to fifth, where he ultimately finished to earn his eighth top five and series-leading 18th top 10 in 26 regular season starts.

“We had a pretty good No. 2 Whelen Chevrolet. It was a good weekend for us,” Love said after the race. “We had top-three pace most of the day, but I let the No. 18 get into our inside, and you can’t let that happen late in the race or people are going to take advantage of you. So that was a bummer. I feel like if that hadn’t happen, we probably would have run second to Connor. The restarts at the end when the yellows came out just didn’t really go our way.

“I’m not really sure if I put too much importance or emphasis on things that maybe didn’t matter at the end, and maybe should have focused on some other things, but regardless I feel like we did a good job this weekend,” Love added. “We didn’t qualify the greatest and we just put our heads down and continued to focus on the task at hand.

“I’m proud of the team for that and we’re in a pretty decent spot heading to Bristol to open the playoffs. Now, it’s full steam ahead to chase a championship, and I know we have a team that can get all the way to [the Championship 4 round in] Phoenix.”

Love’s second full-time season in the Xfinity Series has already been a career year, with a new high-water mark in top fives, tying his top 10 mark from a season ago, and being on pace to better both his average starting position and average finishing position from 2024.

The next step is breaking into the Championship 4, a quest that begins with the first of seven races in the playoffs on Friday night, Sept. 12 at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway.

He enters the playoffs as the No. 4 seed, eight points above the provisional elimination line on the strength of his season-opening victory at Daytona (Fla.) Int’l Speedway back in February and a fourth-place finish in the regular season standings which netted him seven bonus playoff points.

Coverage of the Food City 300 from Bristol is slated for 7:30 p.m. ET, live on The CW, the Performance Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, channel 90.

In two prior starts at The Last Great Colosseum, Love has a pair of top-six finishes, with a best of fourth from his rookie season during last year’s playoff race at the high-banked concrete half mile.