ALL-STAR: The Day T-Rex Roared

Sprint Cup

ALL-STAR: The Day T-Rex Roared

Jeff Gordon won the 1997 NASCAR All-Star race in a Jurassic Park car...

Jim Pedley | http://www.RacinToday.com | Posted May 09, 2011 Charlotte, NC

T-Rex won the All-Star Race in 1997 and was never raced in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series competition again. (Photo: www.hendrickmotorsports.com)

ALL-STAR Watch Presented By Lowe's - Let's Build Something Together

In 1997, Rex Stump, an engineer in the Hendrick Motorsports research and development department, posed an academic question to some of his colleagues on Papa Joe Hendrick Blvd. in Mooresville, N.C.

If they could start with an empty canvas and redesign a car top to bottom, he asked his guys, and examine and redesign virtually every teeny-tiny component of the car in a quest for speed, what would they do? What would they build?

The answer sat in Victory Lane at Charlotte Motor Speedway after that year’s NASCAR All-Star race. It was what will go down in history as T-Rex; the car which was perhaps the most tricked-out racer in modern Sprint Cup history.

Because of how innovative, how wrapped in gearhead legend and lore, and how fast it was that night with Jeff Gordon behind the wheel, T-Rex propels itself to No. 10 on the list of top-10 NASCAR All-Star Races.

“T-Rex?” Len Wood, co-owner of the Wood Brothers Racing team would say a couple years later. “I remember it. Oh, I remember it.”

Technically, T-Rex was a Chevrolet Monte Carlo. NASCAR’s version of a Monte Carlo. And it looked like your normal Cup car of the day. Perhaps the most outstanding feature was the paint job. On the hood was a snarling likeness of a tyrannosaurus rex – there to promote the sequel to the movie “Jurassic Park”.

But under the skin, T-Rex, which gets its nickname more as a tribute to Stump than the movie and paint job, was a marvel.

Everything from geometry to construction materials was revamped. Frame rails, suspension parts, you name it, were weighed and examined and altered.

In terms of aerodynamics and handling, it was ground-breaking. It sacrificed horsepower for advantages in drag and down force. It was an engineering monster.

“It would blow your mind when you look at the laundry list of things we did with that” car, Stump told me a couple years later.

Stump took plans for the project to No. 24-car crew chief Ray Evernham. Evernham, being Evernham, told Stump and his boys to go for it. He did issue a condition, however. Make sure it didn’t violate the rule book.

Stump and his crew went over the rule book with a microscope looking for gray areas. And because the rule book is not as specific as it is today – thanks, in part to T-Rex – lots of gray areas were found and exploited.

Still, Stump insists he and HMS people called NASCAR officials and told them what they were up to so as not to get in trouble for building the car. He said NASCAR gave the project the OK.

The car took to the track for the first time for a test at Texas Motor Speedway in the spring of 1997.

“It was a rocket,” Stump said.

Gordon called it, “ridiculous”.

T-Rex was entered into the All-Star Race, then called The Winston.

Gordon sandbagged with it through the first two segments of the race. In the final segment, Gordon let loose of the reins and T-Rex blew the field away.

In post-race inspection, top NASCAR cop Gary Nelson and his people got out their own microscope. They went over it nose to tail, inside and out.

Nelson, a former crew chief known for stretching rules himself, remembers that, “I really admired it in a lot of ways. But I also had to tell their team that we were going to write some new rules that would not let them race a car like that. We wrote the rules the next day.”

SPEED™ is the exclusive television home for the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race from Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., with live race coverage beginning May 21 at 7 p.m. ET.

T-Rex never was shredded. It found a nice home in an inconspicuous corner of the HMS museum. But it never did run in a race again.

The 1997 race itself was fairly unremarkable. It marked the second of Gordon’s three victories. Guess that was the most significant element.

But, for those of us who love racing as much for the machines as for the finishes, 1997 was a heck of moment under lights at Charlotte.

As former crew chief Michael “Fatback” McSwain told me about T-Rex on the 10-year anniversary of that race, “It was use of creativity and ingenuity. Sometimes I think we miss some of that stuff these days. We have too many laws, too many rules.”

Jim Pedley is a veteran, award-winning sports journalist who has worked at, among other places, the Boston Globe, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Kansas City Star. Pedley can be reached at jpedley@racintoday.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Pedley

RacinToday.com

MORE BY THIS AUTHOR

CUP: Kurt Busch Wants No Trouble At Dover
Kurt Busch just looking for nice, smooth day after tumultuous start…
ALL-STAR: Earnhardt’s Pass In Grass Tops The List
The 1987 Sprint All-Star Race arguably stands as the greatest ever...…
ALL-STAR: Kyle Busch A Solid Bet
Kyle Busch's style of driving is seemingly perfect for the Sprint…