Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Darlington Raceway went from another opportunity to win, to a training exercise for the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 team.
Kyle Larson spun off Turn 2 on Lap 4 of the Goodyear 400. The long slide ended with his Chevrolet hitting the inside wall with the front end, which appeared significant enough to be the end of the day. Initially, Larson tried to drive the car back to his pit crew, but the car was too damaged, and it came to a stop. Cliff Daniels, Larson’s crew chief, was quick on the radio to tell his driver to stay in the car so it could be towed to the Damaged Vehicle Policy (DVP) work area.
“I don’t think we’re done,” Daniels said.
The repairs took nearly two hours. Larson sat inside his car throughout as the team worked, and he returned to the race 160 laps down.
By returning to the race, Larson gained one position. He finished 37th and took one point.
“Given the opportunity to go through what we had to go through, which was replacing the front bumper bar, a lot of the components within the nose, that was a really good education for our team of just understanding the process with NASCAR (and) their level of expectation,” Daniels said. “There are a lot of safety items on the car; there are tethers to the different parts of the nose, the splitter, so there are a lot of little details that if you’re going to embark on crash repair at Talladega in a couple of weeks or other tracks down the road, just from the learning and a process standpoint, today was really valuable for that.”
NASCAR revised its DVP policy ahead of this season. It is now at the discretion of the race teams whether their race is over after they can take the car to the garage for repairs and damage assessment. A crash like Larson’s on Sunday would likely have been the end of his race in years past because there was an eight-minute clock to make repairs.