Denny Hamlin raises eyebrows with startling words on NASCAR rule linked to his Darlington win: ‘It won’t be the last’

56-time Cup Series race winner Denny Hamlin recently shared his honest opinion on the revised Damaged Vehicle Policy (DVP) in NASCAR. He told his co-host Jared Allen that it was the new DVP rule that allowed him to win the race at Darlington and that this won't be the last time the outcome of a race will be decided by a car that has been repaired and then sent out on the track under the new rules.

While Denny Hamlin had a quick car at Darlington Raceway, he never found himself in the lead of the race. That is, until Kyle Larson's crash on lap 290, which brought out the final caution and sent the race into overtime. A speedy pit stop allowed Hamlin to get into the lead, before a perfect restart got him his back-to-back victory.

Interestingly, Larson was also the one who brought out the first caution of the race when he slid coming out of Turn 2 and hit the inside wall on lap 4. Under the new DVP rule, which allows cars to be repaired even if they can't get back to the pits without any assistance, Larson's car was sent into the garage for repairs and got back into the race on lap 166.

In the latest episode of his podcast 'Actions Detrimental,' Denny Hamlin was asked if the new Damaged Vehicle Policy affected the outcome of the race, to which he responded by saying (via X):

"It did, yeah, it won't be the last either. I mean, certainly, as long as guys are able to repair wrecked race cars. Now, it wasn't the case with Larson's incident. But in the future, what will happen is; you'll go to repair something, and something will fall off, and it'll cause a caution, and is that the game-changing caution of the race or not?” Hamlin remarked.

As a result of his consecutive victory, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver has now jumped into the second spot in the drivers’ standings, behind championship leader William Byron. The JGR driver is still 49 points behind Byron.

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Denny Hamlin credits Larson’s team for getting the #5 car back out on the track

In his post-race interview, Denny Hamlin joked about how he got an assist from Larson that essentially gifted him the victory. However, he understood why the #5 Hendrick Motorsports team worked so hard for almost 160 laps to get Larson back out on the track.

Hamlin explained that they needed to run as many laps as possible to collect valuable data that would help them later in the season when they return to Darlington for the Southern 500.

“You got to give the #5 team credit,” Hamlin added. “They worked really, really hard to get that car back on the racetrack, and for multiple reasons. One is that they wanted to work on, 'We need to analyze our car, we got to come back here for the Southern 500 and we didn't get enough laps to even realize; is our car good or not.' And so, there was a lot of benefit beyond just points for the #5 car to be out there.”

“Was this car optimum for the day? No, definitely not, but any kind of information that they can squeeze out of that last 100 laps or whatever they got to run is beneficial for them," he added.

Larson held the second spot in the drivers’ standings prior to the Goodyear 400, before getting replaced by Denny Hamlin. Both drivers will be back to Cup Series racing next Sunday, April 13, for the Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway.