There wasn’t much of a highlight reel from Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway, but Jesse Love didn’t appear on it once, which is exactly the way it should be for a driver making their NASCAR Cup Series debut.
The 20-year-old driver got behind the wheel of a NextGen car for the first time on Saturday when practice began for the NASCAR Cup Series, making his series debut in the No. 33 Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing.
It was in qualifying that Love turned some heads, though, putting his C4 Ultimate Energy Chevrolet in the top-20 to start Sunday’s 500-lap gauntlet from the 0.533-mile short track in Bristol, Tennessee.
After a sixth-place finish in Saturday’s Xfinity Series event, Love turned his attention to Sunday. Following an odd practice, cold temperatures caused the track to not pick up rubber and wear out tires completely in a 40-lap run.
Everybody, including Love, started the race expecting to have to go into tire conservation. However, at some point in the opening stage of the race, that switch flipped, and ultimately, that’s what hindered the Xfinity Series full-timer.
With a higher ambient temperature and the sun shining down on the racetrack, the NASCAR Cup Series field avoided the problems they had in practice on Saturday, and quickly realized that in-race, ditching the early-race strategy of conserving tires by running slower lap times.
“That’s what screwed me,” Love said in a post-race interview with Frontstretch. “I thought it was going to be a tire race, and then I went a lap down trying not to blow a right front, and it was pretty much fine.”
After the initial setback in the race’s opening stage, Love found himself outside the top 30 and off the lead lap. But the two-time NASCAR Xfinity Series winner continued to be hindered by a lack of stoppages in-race, creating some long green flag runs in the middle portion of the grueling 500-lap contest.
But, during the final stage, a long afternoon of learning became a little more difficult, as on the second-to-last run, the Cup Series debutant had a corded tire, making it very difficult to hold on, dropping the No. 33 back to nearly last place after making his pit stop.
The final 150-ish laps saw Love drove his way back to a 31st-place finish, which may not sound amazing, but considering the competition in the NASCAR Cup Series, it required a great deal of tenacity. The 20-year-old managed to finish 495 of the 500 laps and came one spot short of a top-30.
“I thought our pace was decent,” Love said afterwards. “I was just too tight all day, all weekend, really in kind of all the cars I drove. So, we had that going against us, but still around other cars, I feel like I could run quick lap times and all of that stuff. It was a lot of fun, and I feel I was comfortable in it, and I think that was what was most important for me to feel today.”
Love is expected to make additional NASCAR Cup Series starts this season in the No. 33 Chevrolet, but Richard Childress Racing has yet to confirm the dates on which the two-time ARCA Menards Series West champion will return to the seat.
