It’s been an eventful couple weeks on the track for Rajah Caruth and Jesse Love, who have had a couple run-ins. After a dust-up at Martinsville, the two came together on the track again at Rockingham on Saturday.
This time it was Rajah Caruth getting into the back of Jesse Love to send him into the wall. Caruth attempted to switch lanes during a run, but misjudged the space, clipping Love and sending the No. 2 car into the outside wall. The impact wasn’t massive, but it was enough to immediately trigger frustration from Love over the radio.
After the race, Caruth went quickly to the RCR team area to apologize. And he made sure to note his apology to reporters, too.
“Yeah, oh, other thing,” Caruth said, per Matt Weaver of Motorsport. “Obviously I got into the 2 earlier, and I was just trying to cross behind him. Obviously didn’t mean to do that, and obviously I’ll go over there once we finish up over here. Obviously wanted to do that better, but glad to have a somewhat quiet day at the end.”
Rajah Caruth’s mistake ended up being pretty detrimental to Jesse Love. The No. 2 car had issues throughout the day related to the right-side contact from the wall.
RCR’s Danny Lawrence explained what happened. Essentially, an uncontrollable vibration caused all sorts of problems.
“When he got in the wall there, when him and the 88 got in the wall there, there was a bunch of stuff bent on the right front end, on the right rear,” Lawrence said. “And it broke the nuts out that holds the wheel spacers on. So the wheels kept coming loose, and you can see on the back of the wheels where all that stuff was backing out.
“So he came in and we hammered, hammered on the lug nuts. And even when we didn’t need to stop that last time we came in just to make sure. But that’s what was happening, is the right-side wheels were coming loose.”
The good news? Rajah Caruth and Jesse Love seemed to handle things professionally despite having a run-in for the second straight week.
At Martinsville, it was the drivers who opted to handle things with cooler heads as Love’s team initially stepped in to confront Caruth. In any case, Caruth was quick to quiet things down on Saturday after another potential flare-up.
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