Strong Sixth For Love In Opening Leg Of Bristol Double

Jesse Love (2) battles Jeb Burton Saturday at Bristol Motor Speedway. (Jacob Seelman/Race Face Digital photo)

BRISTOL, Tenn. – An evening where Jesse Love was among the best in class behind eventual race winner Kyle Larson ended in a strong sixth-place finish Saturday at Bristol Motor Speedway.

After qualifying 13th in the No. 2 Whelen Engineering Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing, Love made quick progress from the drop of the green flag and never ran lower than his starting position throughout the SciAps 300.

He garnered points in both 85-lap stages, ranking eighth in stage one and sixth in stage two, before a pair of longer runs developed during the closing stretch at The Last Great Colosseum.

To begin the final stage, Love found himself trailing only Larson and the quartet of JR Motorsports Chevrolets that comprised the top five, and worked his way up to the inside of the second row via the choose rule for a lap-182 restart.

From there, Love maintained pace inside the top five as he worked to conserve the set of Goodyear tires underneath him late into the race. He again lined up third for the day’s final restart with 75 to go, fending off Carson Kvapil multiple times before slowly giving up speed in the closing laps.

Love eventually slipped back to sixth at the finish, but still garnered his sixth top-10 finish in nine races this season. Afterward, the 20-year-old from Menlo Park, Calif., tipped that he had a tire that began giving up on him in the final laps, leading to a bit of conservation to get to the finish.

“We’re pretty sure we corded one there on the final run,” said Love. “I tried to give it one last push there, and for a couple of laps we were the fastest car on the racetrack, but it didn’t quite last for us. I knew if things worked out, I had the speed to drive away from the (No.) 8 (Sammy Smith), but if they didn’t then I probably wasn’t going to escape that battle.

“I think I learned that I probably shouldn’t have pushed quite so much on offense there; I probably needed to play a bit more defense at that point in the race to keep from giving up the spots that we did at the very end,” Love continued. “I wasn’t going to catch (Kvapil) once he got past me … so maybe I made a bit of a wrong call on my part there, but I still feel like we maximized what we brought to the racetrack this weekend.”

Noting that “it was a team effort,” Love was pleased how his Danny Stockman-led crew rebounded after a rough race the week prior at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway that ended outside the top 10.

Jesse Love (Jacob Seelman/Race Face Digital photo)

“I thought this whole team, Danny and all my guys, did a good job adjusting on our car to keep up with the racetrack,” he said. “We were a little too tight all day, but we got it better at the end than we were to start, so that’s always a good sign of progress.

“We got some stage points, got a top 10, and leave with a pretty clean race car. Here at Bristol, that’s a solid day’s work.”

Love maintains third place in the Xfinity Series standings leaving Bristol, 109 points back of series leader and defending champion Justin Allgaier in the regular season rankings.

With the first leg of his double duty weekend complete, Love turns his focus to his NASCAR Cup Series debut Sunday afternoon in RCR’s No. 33 Chevrolet. He’ll carry backing from C4 Energy in the Food City 500 and qualified 19th for his maiden voyage at stock car racing’s top level.

Though Love put together a strong Saturday and was “very pleased” with his time trial effort, he doesn’t believe that much – if anything – that he learned in the Xfinity Series will translate to his Cup car.

“I think it’s going to be a tire (conservation) race, just like we saw here last spring in the Cup Series,” Love said. “If it wasn’t like that in practice, I’d say I could take more away from this race … because the track got really tight and took a lot of rubber. It was honestly unbelievable to me how much rubber it took.

“I’m going to write this one off for tomorrow and go in with an open mind. I’ve worked my entire life just so I can be nervous on Sundays, and that pressure will be a privilege when I strap in tomorrow.”

Broadcast coverage of the Food City 500 at Bristol is slated for 3 p.m. ET, live on FS1, the Performance Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, channel 90.