NASCAR’s Elton Sawyer explains controversy with Damaged Vehicle Policy at Talladega

Elton Sawyer spoke to reporters after the Talladega race about NASCAR’s damaged vehicle policy (DVP) after a big wreck occurred during the final laps. NASCAR’s vice president of competition revealed the one goal the organization has when determining whether a car can go back on the track.

“Our goal is never to put good cars out of the race,” Sawyer said, per Bob Pockrass of Fox Sports. “When we developed DVP five or 10 years ago, that’s never been the goal. Based on our experiences last week at Kansas and looking at what happened there, with the four car, we felt like we probably could have made a different call there. We had a good car that probably just needed tires last week.

“As we went into this week, we wanted to err on the side of the competitor. Again, we don’t want to put cars out of the race. We had a situation in Turn 3 where we got 25-plus cars down. We’re not sure why they can’t continue we don’t know if it’s strictly because they’re just in the grass or high-sided. For us to make a determination that they got some suspension damage and can’t continue, that puts a lot on us that we want to err on the side of the competitors. Once we got the 14 and nine back to pit road, they made their small repairs that they can make on pit road and went out and met minimum speed. We felt like we made the right call there.”

Elton Sawyer talks more about NASCAR’s Damaged Vehicle Policy

Sawyer added: “As we’ve gone through Next Gen and DVP over the last two and three-quarter years now, I think the program has worked well. There’s some efficiencies that has worked really well. Obviously, there’s some things that we need to look at in the offseason, some learnings from this car and how we can implement the DVP policy going forward.

The wreck (also known as “The Big One”) occurred with less than five laps to go after Brad Keselowski bumped into Austin Cindric who was battling for the lead with eventual winner Ricky Stenhouse Jr. Cindric lost control, causing a chain reaction that collected more than 20 cars, including eight of the 12 playoff drivers. NASCAR’s DVP was launched in 2017 and allows teams seven minutes to repair damage incurred and meet minimum speed following the conclusion of the repairs.