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

"Every detail of that car had been optimized," Nelson said. "But none of it was outside the rules. ..."So we said, `Let's let them race it and get to work on our rulebook.' "

The wheels were in motion when Evernham made it to post-race inspection."They said, `Don't bring it back,' "Hendrick said of NASCAR's inspectors. "I said, `Hold on a minute. You can't tell me one week that it's OK and then the next week tell me not to bring it back!' "

Evernham also was aghast.

As teams prepared for the next week's Coca-Cola 600, NASCAR inspectors came to Hendrick Motorsports for a closer look at T-Rex."We asked them to tell us what was wrong with it," Stump said. "Maybe that was a mistake, because they spent a good bit of time really looking at the car. Then they went back and wrote a whole bunch of new rules that basically outlawed it."

The co-operation, however, helped NASCAR. "By letting us come over to examine the car closely, that helped us to write more definitive rules," he said. "That way, only one car was affected."

Stump said NASCAR added at least a half-dozen rules specifically to address issues raised by T-Rex. Nelson won't argue."They were going to write new rules anyway," Evernham said. "What we did by letting them poke around and measure everything was probably saved the rest of our fleet.

"We were trying to win championships and do different things and it was like, `Do we want to fight this battle and give up everything else, or do we give up on this one and go on?' I know Rex took that hard because it was his baby. I didn't like it all and I still don't, but they didn't want the car, bottom line, and you have to pick your fights."

Hendrick couldn't be too angry with his rivals."I would have done the same thing," he said. "That's the unique deal in this garage area. You're either going to do what the other teams are doing, or you're going to turn them in. ..."We couldn't force them to let us keep using T-Rex. We had already started taking pieces of what we had learned and put it into our other cars."

Nelson said everyone was trying to do the right thing."The motives were right on our end to protect the garage," Nelson said. "The motives were right on their side to take rules as they're written and make the car better. I don't fault them, that's their job. But I don't fault what we did, because that's NASCAR's job."

The legend of T-Rex is that it retired undefeated. That's a tale.

It was said that the car was turned into a show car and never raced again. The truth is the chassis was used in the 1997 Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Gordon finished fourth.

"We had it pretty disguised, and we had fixed a lot of the stuff that NASCAR had complained about," Evernham said. "T-Rex was undefeated in its original form, but when we made some of the changes that we had to make, it got beat."

Though the team got minimal use of T-Rex, almost everyone involved believes it was a worthwhile project."Ultimately, it didn't matter how many rules they changed for that car," Garde said. "They're still making rules about stuff we built for it."

Garde now has a shop at his house near Charlotte and makes parts for several Cup teams. "I am still building a lot of stuff now that evolved from that process, because it made you think carefully about the process," he said.

"That's exactly what it was, a new thought process," said Evernham, whose team builds its own chassis, no doubt using some of the things learned."We learned stuff off of that car that we wound up using inside the new rules they wrote that have helped us on and on and on," Hendrick said. "That car paid us big dividends."

Even Nelson sees value in T-Rex."The evolution of ideas is a healthy thing," Nelson said. "... I read a quote once that said, `The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.' "Junior Johnson, maybe? No, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

T-Rex, or what's left of it, is on display at the Hendrick Motorsports museum in Harrisburg.

"That's good," Nelson said. "It's a perfect thing for a museum."

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