HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Jesse Love made a point to stroll the length of several pit stalls Saturday evening at Homestead-Miami Speedway, embracing each member of his No. 2 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet team before fulfilling his post-race obligations. His title defense in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series had just ended one spot short in the standings, but he made sure to share his appreciation with his colleagues from the last three seasons.
That final campaign came to an end just 14 points shy of a second consecutive O’Reilly Series crown, as Justin Allgaier powered to championship No. 2 in Saturday’s season finale at the 1.5-mile Homestead track. Love – who finished where he started in fourth place – joined fellow title contenders Carson Kvapil, Sheldon Creed and Corey Day on the minus side of the points after the 300-mile curtain-closer.
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Love is bound for the Cup Series next year, when the 21-year-old driver will team up with Wood Brothers Racing for his rookie season in the No. 21 Ford. First, he offered a heartfelt goodbye.
“These things sting, and you know, obviously it hurts, right?” said Love, who led just once for four of the 200 laps. “It doesn’t hurt as bad as I thought it was going to, just because I feel like the gratitude I have for the last three years of my life and the people that I’m around and got to spend time with these last three years, that emotion overwhelms the loss of a championship, which is very mind-boggling to me. At the end of the day, the company you keep on journeys like this sometimes matters more than the destination of it all.”
The journey was promising early on as Love erased six points from his 22-point deficit at the stages, but as the race entered its second half, a victory nearly became essential for his title hopes. Those chances dimmed on the race’s final restart, when Love’s No. 2 Chevy slipped from third to seventh as it bogged down on slightly older tires. He worked his way back to fourth over the final 49-lap green-flag stretch to the end.
Creed made a strong stake in the championship pursuit early, as he started from the pole and led the most laps (99) in his dark-horse bid for his first O’Reilly Auto Parts Series championship. He slightly closed the gap on the 42-point deficit that he carried into Homestead from the outset, with dominance that came early as he traded the top spot with Haas Factory Team teammate Sam Mayer, who swept the stage wins.
Creed was running third before a wall scrape in the closing laps caused his right-front tire to shred at the start of his final lap, with Allgaier’s No. 7 Chevrolet hitting the carcass as he took the checkered flag. Creed ultimately came home sixth in the race and fourth in the standings, 33 points back, and he volunteered his frustration with 26th-place finisher Joey Gase’s role in traffic.
“I was running down (Kvapil) pretty quickly, and yeah, we got to lapped traffic and kind of at the end of every run, I would die and just lose a lot of grip for whatever reason, and it made it really hard to make pace,” said Creed, who will move to Sam Hunt Racing next season. “We got to some lap cars and the 55 (Gase), and he just is in the way, never gets out of the way, doesn’t have any respect or awareness for the leaders. That’s Joey Gase for you, all the time, all the time. But yeah, I really struggled behind him; I needed to clear him, and I didn’t as quickly as I needed to.”
Like Creed, Kvapil’s season produced his first three O’Reilly Series victories, and it yielded at least a faint mathematical shot at his first title. But he was forced to rally after reporting a low-voltage reading to his crew on Lap 37, prompting his No. 1 JR Motorsports crew to change the battery nine laps later during the stage break.
His power-packed comeback efforts nearly netted a race win. Kvapil led 36 laps late and was the top finisher among title-eligible drivers, but his second-place outcome ended up almost four seconds behind finale winner Brandon Jones at the checkers.
“I don’t think we had a good enough first half of the race,” said Kvapil, third in the final standings with a minus-28 margin. “We didn’t get enough stage points, and we just needed the 7 to have a mistake or have something happen to them at the end, even if we wanted to give us those points that we needed, but I don’t know. We did our best. We fought all day and worked on it a little bit, got it really good. One thing, I was super-nervous about ripping the fence. I felt like in practice I never really got the hang of it. But by Stage 2, we made an adjustment, and I felt like I was one of the best up there. So, a small victory for me, I guess you’d say.”
Day’s shot fizzled earliest as he collided and crashed with Rajah Caruth on Lap 8, squeezing both HendrickCars.com Chevrolets into the outside wall at the entrance to Turn 3. Day’s No. 17 ride was towed to the O’Reilly Series garage for repairs, and he lost 17 laps to the leader. He accepted the blame after he finished 25 laps in arrears with a 34th-place result in the 38-car field, winding up fifth in the championship tally, 61 points off the top.
“I just messed up,” said Day, who wrapped up his first full O’Reilly season with four wins. “Yeah, I just didn’t have the pace I needed on the short run, and the 7 got by me, and I needed those points, and I just got greedy and wasn’t clear and cleared myself. So, it’s as simple as that. No one did anything wrong besides me.”