Being the BIG Jeff Gordon fan that I am, I was going through some old VHS tapes of all the races that I have taped and saved over the years, and came across the one from "The Winston" of 1997. I am sure most Jeff Gordon fans will remember this race as the emergence of a car aptly named "T-Rex," and that it only ran one time.
Here is the story behind that "monster" of a race car that was so good...it became an instant "dinosaur."
The dinosaur died early on a Sunday in an inspection bay at Lowe's Motor Speedway.
Jeff Gordon had won The Winston on Saturday night, May 17, 1997. But by the time he and crew chief Ray Evernham had finished celebrations and interviews, it was a new day.
When Evernham went to check on post-race inspection of the No. 24 Chevrolet, a NASCAR official pulled him aside. "He said, `I'm gonna give you a tip,'" Evernham said. "`Don't bring this car back.'" T-Rex was extinct.
It began, as all great legends do, a long, long time ago. Rick Hendrick became a Winston Cup car owner in 1984. Within three seasons, he decided he wanted his teams to build their cars from the chassis up."When you come into the sport, you kind of just do what everybody else does," Hendrick said. "Nobody had a research-and-development program, and you really didn't have time to try stuff and race at the same time."
In 1996, Hendrick had three Cup teams. He won his first championship with Gordon in 1995 and would get another title in '96 with Terry Labonte. In January of '96, engineer Rex Stump was hired and put in charge of an R&D program Hendrick vowed to leave alone. "It was kind of like our own 'Area 51'," Evernham said. By early 1997, Stump's racing laboratory had come up with a big idea.
"We went around to all of the people in the shop and said, `If you had a blank sheet of paper, what would you do different in building a race car?'" Stump said.
"It was something like 60 different people's ideas on how to make a better car." James Garde was one of those people, and he had plenty of ideas. He had always been an avid reader."I would read the rulebook and try to find the gray areas," Garde said. "We decided that we would take every component of a race car and look to see how it complied (with rules) and whether it could be redesigned and manufactured."
Stump studied the rules, too.He also studied what they didn't say."It seemed we had a little more latitude as to what we could do," Stump said. "...Any place where there wasn't a rule, we took what we could."Every aspect of the car was examined in excruciating detail.Hendrick remembers the first time he saw the result.
"I got back there and saw that car, looked underneath it and everything," Hendrick said. "I said, `There's no way you're going to get to run this car.' "All the Hendrick crew chiefs got regular updates on Stump's team. Evernham, long a champion for the R&D effort, showed keen interest.
"I was kind of like Mikey from the cereal commercials," Evernham said. "It was like, 'Give it to Ray, he'll try anything.'"
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