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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
ALL-STAR: T-Rex Growls
Jeff Gordon’s T-Rex is one of the most infamous cars in NASCAR history.
Tom Jensen  |  Posted April 27, 2009   Charlotte, NC
The famous "T-Rex car that brought Jeff Gordon to victory lane in the 1997 NASCAR Sprint All-Star race. (Photo: www.gordononline.com)

The 1997 running of the NASCAR Sprint All-Star race was notable in that it was Jeff Gordon’s second triumph in the event, making him one of only three multiple-time winners.

But that was just a mere footnote compared to the ruckus raised by his Hendrick Motorsports crew chief Ray Evernham, who engineered the most brilliant act of deception in the history of the race, and it was all perfectly legal. In the process, he snookered of the competition and the media with a purpose-built race car that succeeded perfectly in its mission: win the only race in which it would ever appear.

For the 1997 Sprint All-Star race, Evernham and his Hendrick Motorsports crewmen cooked up something special. Gordon’s Chevrolet Monte Carlo carried a special paint scheme promoting Universal Pictures’s upcoming movie release, Jurassic Park: The Lost World. The team nicknamed the car T-Rex, which fans and media alike assumed referred to the dinosaurs from the movie promoted on the hood of the car.

In reality, the T-Rex was named in honor of Hendrick’s lead chassis engineer, Rex Stump, who had designed the chassis. It was so revolutionary that Evernham invited Sprint Cup Director Gary Nelson to his shop to see ahead of time, to ensure that the car would be allowed to compete in the Sprint All-Star Race.

Basically, the chassis of most stock cars are set up for their handling to improve over the course of a tire run, which then averaged about 50-60 laps at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. But the All-Star Race is different. At that time the longest segments were 30 laps each and essentially meaningless to the night’s outcome. The only part of the race that mattered was the 10-lap sprint at the very end. For those conditions, what you wanted was a car that was fastest at the start of the run.

2008 All-Star Highlights

The optimal set-up, therefore, was one that got as much heat into the front tires as quickly as possible, for maximum traction. Over a 50-lap distance, that could cause overheating and blistering, but over short distances, that wasn’t an issue.

So Evernham and Rex designed a radically different suspension system for the T-Rex, with the front shock absorbers mounted as far outboard as possible to get heat in the front tires immediately.

“The car had a lot of different construction features: the way the floor pan and the frame rails were in it,” said Evernham. “The car had an aerodynamic advantage and a mechanical suspension advantage. Rex is a pretty smart guy. He just took everything to the maximum, and it ended up being a pretty nice race car. A lot of the suspension components and things like that that are illegal now were all built within the rules then. We had trailing arms with springs in them, all kinds of stuff, but there were no rules about that at that time.”

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