Jesse Lowe in Victory Lane at I-75 Raceway
Jesse Lowe is doing his best to work his way up through the dirt racing ranks. The 22-year-old Crossville, Tenn. resident has found out this season that there are both ups and downs on the ladder to success in this sport.
However, the young late model driver has enjoyed some good fortune recently and hopes that his pairing with CVR Race Cars and Chip Vineyard will bring about even more good times in the future.
“Our season’s been really up and down,” Lowe explained in a recent telephone interview. “We started out with a CVR we had bought from a gentleman over the winter and we got with Chip and he got us on a program there. We went out to Crossville and we were top-2 or top-3 running behind Brett Wyatt and Drew Kennedy and being competitive with them.
“Then we decided to venture down to Wartburg one night and that kind of got us in trouble when we got flipped over on our lid,” Lowe added. “We had to take it back to Chip and have it clipped and let him go back through it. We had to pretty much redo the whole thing with shocks, parts and body. Then the first race back after that we blew up so we had to sit out another half of the season.”
Even through all of that misfortune, Lowe kept working and believing his time would come. And now it appears as though it has.
“Ever since we got it back, we’ve won every race we finished, heat races included,” the driver who began racing Front Wheel Drive cars at age 12 declared. “We’ve won at Crossville and I-75 in that stretch.”
Among those recent wins was a triumph in the inaugural race at the newly re-opened I-75 Raceway in Sweetwater, Tenn.
“That’s something that no matter what happens from this day forward, no one can ever take away from us,” Lowe said proudly. “I pride myself on just being in racing, and you always hear of those people who won the first race at certain tracks, people will always talk about that so that’s something I pride myself on. We had the same amount of track time everyone else did.”
Lowe has taken a liking to the Tim and Angie Kyle managed facility at I-75.
“The track itself is real racy,” he said. “The past two weeks we’ve started 5th and 7th in our heat races and we’ve been able to come up and pass on the high side and pass on the bottom. It’s definitely different but it’s very racy. It’s going to take a little bit of getting used to chassis wise and setup wise because there aren’t a lot of race tracks around here that are as flat as it is.”
