"Jeff Gordon Flashback": T-Rex Set NASCAR On Its Ear With 1997 "Winston" Win

On his qualifying attempt that Friday, Gordon came to pit road too fast and slid through his pit box. Since each driver's qualifying time was the total of three laps with a pit stop, that error put Gordon 19th on the starting grid.

The next night, Gordon sliced through the field in the 30-lap first segment of The Winston before settling into third place.Gordon lined up 16th when the field was inverted for Segment Two. He was fourth, behind Bobby Labonte, Terry Labonte, and Ricky Craven, after those 30 laps, waiting to show his cards.

"I just remember that car being stuck to the track in a way that I had never felt a car be stuck before," Gordon said. "It just gave me confidence, and it was fast -- it was awesome."It took him less than a lap and a half of the final 10-lap segment to take charge.He passed his teammate, Terry Labonte, for the lead and took off.

"When I got by Terry, I said, `If this thing feels this good for the remainder of this thing, there's no way they can touch me,' " Gordon said that night. Looking back now?

"We killed them," Gordon said. "It was ridiculous."

Stump wonders now if it would have been better if nobody had said anything about T-Rex being different."But that would have been hard," he said. "So many people's efforts went into that car, you wanted to say, `Man, look at what this guy built,' and, `Look at the idea this guy came up with.'

"Ultimately, that bit us."Evernham said it would have been wrong not to be proud.Besides, NASCAR and rival teams had their radar up."I kind of saw it coming," Hendrick said. "People would walk by and look at it, the guys in the garage.

So much attention was being paid to it. When we'd pull the wheels off of it people were looking up under it. I had a feeling, and when the race was over I kind of knew there would be some moaning."

Moaning was an understatement.

"The other car owners looked at it and they all whined and flipped out and said, `We'll have to build all new cars!' " Evernham said. "Everybody panicked. It's easier to kill Frankenstein than it is to figure out how to get along with him."

Nelson, the NASCAR official, remembers his father taking him to a theater to see a closed-circuit broadcast of the Indianapolis 500."It was the first year that a rear-engine car showed up," Nelson said. "I've always remembered that. If one official at Indy had said, `Sorry, but your engine is in the wrong place, you're not racing,' racing would have been different from that point on.

"But they let the car race and didn't react. The next year, 80 or 90 percent of the field had engines in the back, and every car owner in the sport had instant obsolescence for all of his cars."

Nelson uses that story when he's asked about how NASCAR reacted to T-Rex.

"As caretakers of the sport, NASCAR's responsibility is to prevent car owners from having to constantly chase things like that," he said. "We don't want them to have to throw out everything they have because we didn't recognize something soon enough."

But if T-Rex was so radical, why let it race, let Gordon's victory stand, then order the team not to bring it back?

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