Ryan Blaney wrecked out on the opening lap at Watkins Glen on September 15th, 2024. His team was understandably frustrated when officials elected to haul the wounded No. 12 NASCAR Ford Mustang Dark Horse straight to the garage instead of dropping it off in their pit stall to assess the damage, but Brad Moran, NASCAR Cup Series Managing Director, recently sat down and explained exactly why that happened.
Speaking on NASCAR.com, Moran explained that the Damaged Vehicle Policy (DVP), which has been in place since 2017, was developed with a lot of collaboration with people within the industry. Essentially, the program was implemented to prevent teams from performing massive repairs while at the track, which could result in unsafe vehicles being turned out on track.
“As you know, back in the day, they’d bring cars in and cut them in half and kind of weld parts on, put them together,” Moran said. “They really weren’t comfortable with what they were sending the drivers out in. The drivers weren’t comfortable with driving some of these vehicles, so that’s why this program was put in place.”
Moran went on to explain that if a race car is damaged and cannot be driven back to the pits under its own power, then it is considered a total loss and cannot be raced. That’s exactly what happened to Blaney when his No. 12 NASCAR Ford hammered the wall and sustained critical damage, necessitating a tow behind the wall to the garage.
“I totally get Blaney’s frustration,” Moran said of the Lap 1 incident at the Glen. “But he was involved in the incident with the 6 [of Brad Keselowski], which did end up busting the front suspension or steering… that would be consistent with what we’ve been doing since 2017.”
There are instances where a race car will get stuck and can’t be driven out of its position but is otherwise undamaged, such as what happened with the Next Gen race cars when they were first introduced in 2022. This prompted NASCAR to come up with the Flat Tire Recovery, which allowed a driver to continue racing even if their car had to be hauled out of a precarious position due to a blown tire. But Blaney’s race car was simply too damaged to continue, which was why he was forced to retire under DVP guidelines.
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