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Victory By Design: Ferrari DVD
Alain de Cadenet, a long-time Ferrari enthusiast and aficionado, drives some of the great sports racers and sports cars.
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Red Hot Ringtone: Air Rachet Single Burst
Sound off with SPEED Ringtones!
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Ferrari 60 Years: The Great Moments
by Leonardo Acerbi
by Leonardo Acerbi
This lavish book dedicates a whole chapter to each of Ferrari's 60 years in existence.
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Written by:
Tom Jensen
05/01/2008 - 01:04 PM
Harrisburg, N.C.
SPEED will televise the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race XXIV and the NASCAR Sprint Showdown live on May 17, as well as provide more than 90 hours of support programming prior to the event. Stay tuned to SPEEDtv.com for frequent updates... ยป More Photos
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 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
Basically, the chassis of most stock cars are set up for their handling to improve over the course of a tire run, at the time 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.
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 the cars would not be racing more than 30 laps at a time.
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.
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