BRISTOL, Tenn. — Jesse Love will make his NASCAR Sprint Cup Series debut on Sunday at Bristol Motor Speedway.
Love will drive a third car for Richard Childress Racing, which fields his full-time Xfinity Series effort, as a teammate to Kyle Busch and Austin Dillon.
A two-time winner in the Xfinity Series, the 20-year-old Californian has plenty of laps in multiple types of cars at the .533-mile concrete track, which led to the decision to make his series debut there.
“It’s one of the better race tracks for me… kind of more my wheelhouse,” Love explained. “I don’t really enjoy the flat track stuff a whole lot. I really enjoy the tracks with a lot of banking, a lot of grip, moving around, running the wall, getting on the top, bottom, the middle… kind of wherever there’s grip and a clean race track. I like to search around and I can do that here.
“I’m comfortable with the race track and have enough laps here,” he continued. “I took enough detailed notes over the years. When I come here, I’m having to learn a whole new race car. I didn’t really get do any testing, right? So I can eliminate one of the factors of learning, which is learning the race track, right?
“Still picking up, you know, things here and there throughout the weekend, but because I’ve been here enough, I can come here for the Cup race and not have to learn a race track and a car at the same time.”
Time in the simulator was a big part of Love’s preparation for his Cup Series debut.
“I ran a lot of laps in the simulator. I think I probably ran about probably 2,000 laps this week on the simulator, whether it be the DiL at the GM Tech Center or whether it be even iRacing with Scott Speed,” Love explained. “So just ran a lot of laps… trying different things. You know, one thing I did this week was I ran a couple 500-lap races by myself on iRacing, just to kind of condition myself to the mental drain it’s going to take to run 500 laps.
“Obviously, it’ll be the longest race in my life. Never ran a 24-hour race before, right? So this is going to be different for me in a lot of ways.”
Love, who is running Saturday evening’s Xfinity Series race, has other measures in place in regard to his fitness for Sunday.
“The fitness level I actually feel pretty confident about. I’ll go to the care center after the race (Xfinity) and get an IV,” Love said. “I have a bus for the first time this weekend, so I don’t have to travel back and forth to the hotel and can kind of go right to bed. And, you know, I feel like the fitness side of it is going to be fine.”
Love acknowledged he’s leaned on Busch a bit in preparation for his Cup Series debut.
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’d be dumb of me to not go ask some questions and pick his brain when I can,” Love said. “And he’s been helpful, for sure. I always feel like Kyle (Busch) has been open book. I will say, you know, Kyle’s probably the toughest competitor in the garage, and I do notice a little bit of a difference when I’m asking him questions when I’m not racing against him versus when I am racing against him, right?
“It’s really cool to pick a guy’s brain like that.”
