NASCAR driver says he was 'cooked' in his cockpit and scarred for life

If you ever wondered how NASCAR drivers manage to stay cool in the searing heat of the cockpit, well sometimes they don’t.

While technology is advancing all the time, recently including the design of special cooling shirts and vests to keep body temperatures manageable, sometimes that technology still just cannot deal with the elements.

One man who knows this all too well is NASCAR Xfinity Series phenom Jesse Love, who has continued his development in 2025 by reaching the Round of 8 in the current playoffs.

READ MORE: Carson Hocevar has a five-point plan to fix NASCAR

Jesse Love on the burning pain of Nashville

The 20-year-old from Menlo Park in California was asked this week about the time he had felt most miserable ever during a race - it’s a staple of those terrific Jeff Gluck ‘12 Questions’ interviews which appear weekly on The Athletic.

His answer was both painful and enlightening about the challenges, and dangers, that drivers still face in 2025.

Love told Gluck: “Nashville last year. It was super, super hot. My helmet fan quit working before the start of the race, and about halfway through, my cool shirt quit circulating because everything was getting so hot that all the fans were tripping.”

The impact of this system failure was absolutely brutal for Love, and he literally carries the scar today.

He continued: “So nothing worked. I basically had boiling marks on my back - I still have a scar on my lower back from it. It killed me, cooked me from the inside out.”

'I poured water on my shirt, and it steamed'

If you want to know what the visual appearance of this unwanted was, Love provided it in graphic detail.

“I took water and poured it on my shirt, and it steamed. It was terrible - it was 104 degrees with the “feels like” temperature that day.”

Love returns to playoff action this weekend at Las Vegas (Saturday, 7.30pm ET, CW) in the Focused Health 302. Temperatures are expected to be around 78 degrees at start time.

READ MORE: NASCAR adds more horsepower but it is still 'a bandaid on a bullet wound'

Related