Jesse Love has certainly lived up to any expectations. After dominating in ARCA last year, he was promoted straight up to the Xfinity Series to drive the No. 2 Camaro for Richard Childress Racing.
In his first-ever season in one of NASCAR’s premier national series, he’s led the field and scored a runner-up in just his first six races, beating out not only rookies but longtime series regulars.
While Love clearly has talent in spades, those kinds of results take a lot of hard work. Love explained that he’s spent time in the simulator to adjust to the difference in short track racing between the cars he’s used to and Xfinity Series equipment.
“I think that the simulator was fine for me this week. For some reason the short track stuff for me is the hardest, just because I grew up racing the short track stuff on a bias-ply tire and now I’m on a radial stuff. I feel like I put in a lot of work,” Love said.
“For me, the biggest thing is looking at SMT [data], looking at speed traces and figuring out, what are my patterns, right? Just doing a lot of studying over the past few days about what I can do to be better at the short track things, and I feel like I worked really hard at it this week, so I’m looking forward to this weekend, hopefully putting those to good use and learning from the things that I picked up last week at Richmond.”
It might not look like it, but the Xfinity Series has been a challenge for Love. ARCA features non-competitive pit stops and shorter races, meaning he never had to learn some of the technique elements and endurance that his competitors are used to.
“When I was running ARCA races, I couldn’t really do the wrong thing,” Love admitted. “But now I’m trying to hussle the thing and make speed, but also I feel like it’s easy to make problems worse when you’re trying to hussle really hard on a short track.
“It’s just the details. There’s a lot of things – pit road is the perfect example. I’ve made two mistakes this year on pit road: COTA we were able to bounce back, but we went from being in a really good spot to having to restart at the tail end of the field for the final stage. Vegas it just completely ruined our race entirely.
“So minimizing those mistakes, mistakes I didn’t have to learn about in ARCA since we didn’t have any pit road in ARCA,” Love said. “The core stuff that’s really important, the nuts and bolts, is the same, but if you make two mistakes here you’re probably done.”
For right now, Love’s focus is squarely on the Playoffs. He enters Martinsville fourth in points, squarely in contention, but he is looking for that win. That means treating this Martinsville race as a chance to get dialed in for fall’s Playoff elimination event. While those are big words for any series rookie, they sound totally reasonable for Jesse Love.
His season so far has been impressive by any measure, but the hard-working Love isn’t satisfied.
“We’re not where we want to be quite yet, but I think if we keep doing what we have been doing, by the end of the year we’re going to be really good.”
That attitude seems like it’s why.
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