BRISTOL, Tenn. — For each of her children’s birthdays, Elizabeth Love puts together a video.
For son Jesse’s 20th birthday in January, Elizabeth Love used footage from when Jesse, then 5, went to the track to drive a quarter midget for the first time.
“You can see the look on that little boy’s face, he was never afraid,” Elizabeth said of her son. “From the moment he got in that car … you could just see it in Jesse’s eyes, you can see it through the shield on his helmet, that he’s like, ‘OK, I got this.’ And there he goes.”
That little boy — he’ll always be that little boy to parents Elizabeth and Jesshill “Duke” Love — will make his Cup debut today at Bristol Motor Speedway. Jesse Love will start 19th, next to former Cup champion Chase Elliott in the 10th row.
Jesse Love is trying to take this all in as if it’s any other day for a driver who became the youngest champion in NASCAR history when he claimed his first of back-to-back ARCA Menards Series West title in 2020 at the age of 15 years old.
Jesse said he used the drive from the Charlotte area to Bristol on Friday to let his mind wander along the hilly trip about the journey he’s gone to this point.
“It was like driving to Baylands, which is where I grew up racing quarter midgets,” said the Menlo Park, California native. “It was kind of a similar, I guess, like terrain and route. So that was a pretty cool emotional experience for me.
“I remember when I was, five, six, eight years old running quarter midgets with my dad, driving up this windy path one way or one lane road up to the go-kart track and then now doing the same thing going to a Cup race. That was a really cool full circle moment for me.”
Success has joined Jesse on the journey through racing’s ranks. He claimed the ARCA Menards Series title at age 18 in 2023. He made the playoffs as a rookie in the Xfinity Series in 2024.
Jesse began his second season in Xfinity by winning at Daytona for his second career series victory. How many more seasons he has in the series at Richard Childress Racing remains to be seen.
A full-time Cup ride seems in his near future.
As Jesse prepares for his first Cup ride, his father, who raced quarter midgets with Jeff Gordon as a youth and was friends with him and Gordon’s stepfather John Bickford, reflects upon something Bickford told him a few years ago.
“When Jesse was about 14, I said, ‘John, it looks like we potentially shot at doing this … and I said, what do you think?’” Duke Love said. “He said, ‘Well, you have to realize Duke that putting your kid in a Cup car is … the equivalent of threading a needle through an asteroid field blindfolded.’ And I never forgot that.”
Jesse will climb into the No. 33 for today’s race, a third entry for RCR. His parents will be there with him before the watch and watch from pit road.
Jesse said he ran about 2,000 laps on a simulator or iRacing to prepare for this race. Still, there are many uncertainties.
“I’m just looking forward to like seeing the depth of the field and how hard you run for 30th,” Jesse said. “It’s super easy for me to run inside the top 10 of an Xfinity race, right? It’s like climbing Mount Everest for me to go run top-10 this weekend (in Cup). So, I’m looking forward to seeing like the, I guess, the depth of the field. And then obviously, I don’t know what I don’t know, as well.
“So, there’s a lot of things that I don’t know what I’m going to be curious about, but I’ll figure that out pretty quickly in the race. It will probably be a couple of things like pit road and restarts and then aggression level. Those are three things that I’m going to try to figure out when I leave the racetrack how to bridge that gap.
” ... So, yeah, there’s a lot of things I’m curious about and a lot of things that I know that I’m going to have to figure out in the moment.”
