MARTINSVILLE, Va. – A 12th-place finish Saturday at Martinsville Speedway, courtesy of an ill-handling race car, left Jesse Love short of the win he needed to make the NASCAR Xfinity Series Championship 4.

Love’s Richard Childress Racing-prepared No. 2 Whelen Chevrolet Camaro qualified strong, allowing him to start fourth and run up front early in the National Debt Relief 250, but as the first few stints wore on it became clear that the 19-year-old from Menlo Park, Calif., didn’t have the tools he needed to fight with.

After finishing the first 60-lap stage in fifth, Love lost ground on pit road during a lap-106 pit stop and faded to 12th in stage two before radioing to crew chief Danny Stockman that his car “was nowhere near what we need to win,” and later pitting for a major chassis adjustment with 113 laps left.

That off-sequence stop put Love back in 32nd for the next restart, and he spent the remainder of the race trying to rebound with what he had.

Through attrition and several late-race restarts, Love found his way back up to 15th by the penultimate restart with 24 laps left, then advanced three more spots to end up 12th at the checkered flag.

Unfortunately for Love, he was in a must-win scenario by the end of the second stage, meaning his rookie-year playoff run came to an end one race short of contending for a series championship.

“We had a package coming in here that we pretty much knew would either haul the mail – which it did for a couple of laps at a time – or would be a struggle for us, and the latter is pretty much what we ended up with,” admitted Love after the race. “We just missed it. It wasn’t just the car; it was a mixture of me and how I was driving what I had, and we just didn’t work out for one another in this one.

“I’m not disappointed, though, because I truthfully feel like I did all that I could leading up to the race and the team did all that they could for us to be prepared as a group,” he continued. “I’d be disappointed if I felt like we lost out on [the Championship 4] from a lack of effort, but I don’t feel that was the case when I look at it from inside this race team.”