Structure-born noise is one of the most important contributors to the interior noise in a vehicle cabin. This can be effectively reduced by placing damping pads with special material properties along the chassis and on the large, radiating panels. This paper proposes a new methodology for the optimization of placing these pads as a part of a full vehicle acoustic simulation in Actran Virtual SEA. With this new strategy, it was possible to reduce the among of damping pads on a real car structure by 33 % while keeping the same acoustic performance. This was validated by investigating the mean velocity of the floor panel in two load cases and compared to the original damping pad layout to the optimized one.