For the third time in his rookie season, Jesse Love wins the pole award for the NASCAR Xfinity Series, this time at Texas Motor Speedway. The young driver has been lightning-fast in qualifying so far this season.
Jesse Love and this Richard Childress Racing No. 2 team have been great in 2024. They keep giving Love fast cars for qualifying and he keeps laying down fast laps. Daytona, Atlanta, and now Texas. The 2023 ARCA Menards Series champion is making a lot of noise.
The race kicks off tomorrow at 1:30 PM EST. Cole Custer, the defending Xfinity Series champion will line up on the front row next to the rookie.
The last two times Jesse Love won a pole award, he also led the most laps in the race. At the last intermediate track he was on at Las Vegas, he was P17. So, something has to give here. When he has had fast cars, he’s led a ton of laps. His experience on the 1.5-mile track, not so good.
In his last four races, Phoenix, COTA, Richmond and Martinsville, Love has been great. Two top-5s and two top-10s in those races. His RCR teammate, Austin Hill, has two wins and a ton of great finishes as well. Hill will fire off P11 tomorrow afternoon.
Jesse Love is putting on a clinic
When it comes to going from ARCA straight to Xfinity, that can be a tough jump. A lot of drivers don’t make that jump straight away, not without a stop in the Truck Series. Love decided to make that leap.
In his first full-time season in the ARCA Menards Series, he won the championship and won half of the races during the season. Now it looks like he could be on the Ty Gibbs timeline as he looks to be one of the best drivers in the Xfinity Series as a rookie.
There is a lot of great talent in this series right now. So a championship is going to be insanely hard to pull off. The point I’m making is that with how quickly Love has caught on, it appears that he could be on that same talent level as Gibbs, albeit a couple of years behind.
Jesse Love proved that the first two weeks of the season were flukes. Those were superspeedway poles. Texas requires an extra level of finesse. This is only the beginning.
More must-reads: