NASCAR insiders consider suggestion for eliminating DVP policy, awarding more points in races

NASCAR insiders looked at whether the Damaged Vehicle Policy (DVP) should be eliminated from races. On The Teardown podcast, Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi of The Athletic answered a question from a fan who asked if NASCAR should get rid of the DVP and only award points down to 30th or 25th place in races instead of all the way to last.

“There’d be a lot of implications on this for me. I do think that there’d be some positives in that, Gluck said. …I don’t how it would shake out in the playoffs. I wouldn’t be opposed to it, I would just have to think more about it and see some simulations or whatever of how it would sake out.”

Bianchi also thinks that eliminating the DVP wouldn’t be a bad thing. “At first blush, I don’t mind it. I think it’s actually a good rule,” Bianchi said. “It would help alleviate some of the DVP issues. It certainly would maybe eliminate some of the debris cautions that you see a car comes back on the track and they drop a piece of debris or whatever. We’ve seen that before.

“It maybe helps teams save money in terms of having to make repairs like they know if we’re in an incident, we’re done. I’m not opposed to that. I like it, I want to explore it more like you. I kind of want to see the implications of it like is there a simulations we can do and see how this plays out.”

More on NASCAR’s DVP policy

NASCAR implemented the DVP in 2017. If a car is damaged on the track, the pit crew is allowed to repair the DVP rule. If the crew repairs the car within the timeframe (10 minutes), the driver is allowed to rejoin the race but will be at the end of the grid.

The DVP was a big issue during the 2024 season, specifically in the playoff race at Talladega. During the race 28 cars were involved in a major crash, leading to confusion about which drivers could return to racing who were sidelined.

“With that program and with that policy, we’ve said that we were gonna take a deeper dive into it in the offseason just to make sure it’s still providing the efficiencies, it’s still providing the benefits that we want from that,” Elton Sawyer, NASCAR senior vice president of competition, said on SiriusXM Radio in October. “But be also able to correct some things that obviously hasn’t worked as well with that policy that we’ve liked. Our goal from day one when this policy came into place was not to put good cars or good trucks out of the race.”