Because Hendrick knew his team was working in the rulebook's margins, he made sure NASCAR was clued in."I do remember seeing the car in certain stages of the building process," said Gary Nelson, NASCAR's managing director for competition who in 1997 was Winston Cup Series director.
"We looked at our rulebook and looked at the car and said it was not outside the parameters of the rulebook. But we followed that by saying, 'Remember, we do control the rules. We can write more.'"
Stump is still reticent to talk in great detail about the car. "I don't want to give away the whole farm," he said. In general terms, it began with bigger frame rails that made the chassis more resistant to twisting forces as it went around the track.Close attention was paid to how much parts weighed. The distribution of weight and how that impacted the car's characteristics also went through intense scrutiny.
The car finally got on the track at a test at Texas Motor Speedway."It was wicked fast when we unloaded it," Stump said. Said Evernham: "We worked on some things and realized it just needed a different kind of a set-up than we were used to running at that time with Jeff. But once we got what it needed, all of a sudden it was wicked fast."One more adjustment was required.
"Jeff came in and said, `If you would move that seat so I didn't feel like it was falling over on the right front, I'll bet I could get another two or three tenths out of it,' " Garde said. "I ... changed the seat and he went out and, sure enough, ran faster."
That the car needed only a few tweaks was a good sign for Stump."We knew we had something," he said. "Jeff was winning with anything—I think you could have built a grocery cart and he could have won with it. That's tough to beat. The object wasn't to beat the competition. It was to beat what we had."
As The Winston approached, Hendrick Motorsports made a deal to promote "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," a sequel to the 1993 hit movie, with a special paint scheme. It featured a large dinosaur painted on the hood of the No. 24. Specifically, the dinosaur was a tyrannosaurus rex. Add that to Rex Stump's role, and the car's nickname was inevitable.They called it T-Rex.
Trained eyes in the Cup garage quickly fell on the car when it was rolled out at the Concord track. Some things were readily apparent."The valence was pretty high up off the ground," Stump said. "You'd walk down and see all the (other cars') valances 3 1/2 or four inches off the ground and this one was 5 1/2 or six inches. These guys in the garage are professionals and they would have noticed."
Despite sitting higher off the ground, when the car went through turns the opposite happened. "It was built to `land' in the middle of the corner to get all of the possible aero benefits, getting it as far down in front as possible and keeping the rear end up," Stump said.
That was a key to what made T-Rex special, Evernham said. "Everything was raised so that when you dropped the nose it created negative pressure under the car," he said. If that sounds like the ground effects that help hold Indy-style cars to the track, you're getting the picture.
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