Alex Weaver goes 1-on-1 with Elton Sawyer, NASCAR's senior vice president of competition, to debrief how NASCAR's new aero changes performed at Talladega and dive into the Damaged Vehicle Policy.
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00:00Here in the garage for the NASCAR cup series after Talladega with the senior vice president
00:03of competition Elton Sawyer for NASCAR.
00:06We saw the big one.
00:07No doubt we usually do when it comes to Talladega but can you walk us through NASCAR's decisions
00:11there on the big one involving the cars that got towed versus didn't get towed and how
00:14that all shook out.
00:15Yeah.
00:16I think on the heels of last week at Kansas, you know, our goal was never to put good cars
00:20out of the race.
00:22Last week as we got looking at that, digesting it, we could tell that maybe we should have
00:26made a different call last week.
00:28So as we went into Talladega this week, we want to make sure that we aired on the side
00:32of the competitors.
00:34We didn't anticipate seeing 25 plus cars down there.
00:37Some of them in the grass, high sided, weren't sure why they couldn't continue.
00:42That's why we made a decision to tow the two to pit row that we did.
00:45The nine and the 14, both of those cars met minimum speed.
00:50So we felt like that was the right call at that time.
00:52We will take a much deeper dive into this than the off season.
00:56This is year three with the gen seven car.
01:00There's a lot of really good things that's come out of that whole process.
01:03DVP has been challenging and we'll go to work on that in the off season.
01:08You mentioned really good things.
01:09We have to talk about the safety because it showed that the aero changes worked for this
01:13car.
01:14No car got airborne here at Talladega.
01:15What do you think of those changes?
01:16Well, I will say that we're extremely pleased that they all stayed on their four wheels.
01:21There's a lot still for us to learn.
01:23We're constantly working with our team there at the R&D center to make sure that if there's
01:27something new that we can learn, there's something that we can adapt to, there's something that
01:32we can put on the cars.
01:33We'll constantly be doing that.
01:35Safety is a destination.
01:36I mean, it's a journey, it's not a destination.
01:40So we're constantly working on that all the time.