Jurassic Terror - 1997 Chevy Monte Carlo 'T-Rex' #blogpost

It may seem hard to believe, but once upon a time, Rick Hendrick was a fresh face to the world of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. In 1984, Rick became a car owner in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series (Now Monster Energy Cup Series). His team, All-Star Racing (now the powerhouse Hendrick Motorsports) consisted of just 5 employees, rented equipment, 2 cars, and driver Geoff Bodine.

The teams back then had traditionally used the same method of building cars. They would start with a production spec car, then modify it to race spec. 3 years after Rick became a car owner, he decided he wanted to start building cars from the ground up. Rick stated “When you come into the sport, you kind of just do what everyone else does, nobody had a Research and Development program, and you really didn’t have the time to try stuff and race at the same time.”

By the time 1996 came around, Hendrick owned 3 Winston Cup teams and he’d won his first championship in 1995 with Jeff Gordon, In January of ‘96, Hendrick hired engineer Rex Stump and put in charge of an R&D team that Hendrick had vowed to leave alone. Jeff Gordon’s crew chief Ray Evernham (who would later found his own team Evernham Motorsport) called “Their own Area 51’.” Stump’s work was put to use throughout the 1996 season, which netted Hendrick his second championship with Terry Labonte.

In early 1997, Stump’s laboratory had come up with a radical idea. Stump went around to everyone in his shop and asked them “If you had a blank sheet of paper, what you do different in building a race car?” He accumulated ideas from about 60 people on how to build a better race car. One such person was James Garde, and he had lots of ideas. He was an avid bookworm who constantly read the rulebook looking for gray areas. “we decided that we would take every component of a race car and look top see how it complied [with the rules] and whether it could be re-designed and manufactured.”

Stump followed suit and began studying the rulebook, looking for what they didn’t say. “It seemed we had a little more latitude as the what we could do, anywhere there wasn’t a rule, we took what we could. Every aspect of the car was examined in excruciating detail.”

The first time Hendrick saw the car, he looked underneath it and everything before saying: “There’s no way you are going to get to run this car.” All of Hendrick’s crew chiefs received regular updates on Stump’s team. Evernham showed keen interest in the project. “I was kind of like Mikey from the cereal commercials,. Give it to Ray, he’ll try anything.”

Because the car technically wasn’t violating the rules, Hendrick ensured that NASCAR’s governing body was kept informed. Gary Nelson, NASCAR’s managing director, who was the head of the 1997 Winston Cup Series, stated “I do remember seeing the car in certain stages of the building process. We looked at our rulebook and the car and said it was not outside the parameters of the rulebook.” but then followed up by saying “Remember, we control the rules, we can write more.”

Stump, however, was reticent to talk about the car. “I don’t want to give away the whole farm.” In general terms, it started with bigger frame rails that made the chassis more resistant to twisting forces as it went round the track. Close attention was plaid to how much the parts weighed. Weight distribution and how it impacted the car’s characteristics also went through intense scrutiny.

The car was eventually taken to Texas Motor Speedway for testing with Jeff Gordon behind the wheel. Evernham said “We worked on some things and realized it just needed a different kind of setup than we’re used to running at that time with Jeff. But once we got what it needed, it was wicked fast.” Just one more adjustment was required. “Jeff came in after a series of test laps and said, ‘If you move that seat so it 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 changed the seat position, Jeff went back out, and ran faster.

The fact that the car only needed a few tweaks was a good sign for Stump “We knew we had something, Jeff was winning with anything - I think we 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 (Now known as the All Star Race) approached, Hendrick Motorsports signed a deal with Universal studios to promote the upcoming move The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the sequel to the critically acclaimed 1993 original. They would use a special one-off paint scheme that featured a large dinosaur painted on the hood of the car. The dino in question was a Tyrannosaurus Rex, paired with Rex Stump’s contribution to the project, the car’s nickname was inevitable: T-Rex.

When the car arrived in the garage at Charlotte Motor Speedway (the venue The Winston was held each year since 1986 exc. 1987), eyes quickly fell on the car. Things immediately became apparent, one of which was the height of the front valence. Stump said “You’d walk down and see all the [other cars’] front valences 31/2 or 4 inches off the ground and this one was 51/2 or 6 inches. These guys in the garage are professionals and they would have noticed.”

Despite sitting high, the car was designed to do the opposite through the corners. Stump stated “It was built to ‘land’ in the middle of the corner to get all the possible aero benefits, getting it as far down possible in the front while keeping the rear end up.” That was why the T-Rex was so special, Evernham said “Everything was raised so that when you drop the nose it created negative pressure under the car.” In essence, what Stump had done was create a steel body stock car, with ground effect, while staying within the rules of the series.

The 16th of May rolled around: Qualifying. The way that qualifying for The Winston worked was the driver had three laps and a pit stop to make, in one session, to get the best overall time. While attempting the pit stop, Gordon came in too fast (there was no pit lane speed limit) and slid straight through his pit box. The error dumped him way down the field to 19th.

The Winston was a 70 lap sprint race (105 miles). It ran as a 30 lap segment, then the running order was reversed, another 30 laps run, a competition caution thrown, then a 10 lap green flag run.

On race night, Gordon sliced through the pack climbing from 19th to 3rd in the 30 lap first segment, before the field was reversed for the second segment. Gordon restarted 16th, driving to 4th. For the final 10 lap segment, he had to fight his way past Bobby Labonte, Terry Labonte and Ricky Craven. After 30 laps, he was ready to play his hand. Gordon said “I just remember that car being stuck to the track in a way that I had never felt a car be stuck before, it just gave me confidence, and it was fast - it was awesome.” A lap and a half into the final 10 lap segment, he passed his teammate Terry Labonte for the lead, and took off.

That night, Gordon said “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. We killed em, it was ridiculous.” Stump wondered if it would have been better if no-one knew anything about what made the car different, but after so much effort from so many people, you just wanted to say “Look what this guy did” and “Look what this guy came up with.”

Evernham stated “Ultimately, that bit us, 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 wasn’t surprised either. “People would walk by it and look at it, the guys in the garage. So much attention was being paid to it. We’d take the wheels off it, people were looking under it. I knew when the race was over I knew there would be some moaning.” Moaning could not have been more of 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 recalled. “Everyone panicked. It’s easier to kill Frankenstein than figure out how to live with him.”

Nelson, the NASCAR official remembers his father taking him to a theater to see a closed circuit running of the Indy 500. It was the first year that a rear-engined car showed up (Jack Brabham in 1961), I’ve always remembered that. One official at Indy said ‘Sorry, your engine’s in the wrong place, you’re not racing.’ But they let the car run and didn’t react. The next year, 80 or 90 percent of the field was rear-engined, and every car owner in the sport had instant obsolescence for all of their cars.” Nelson uses that story everytime someone asks him how NASCAR reacted to the T-Rex. “As caretakers of the sport, NASCAR’s responsibility is to prevent car owners from having to constantly chase things like that, we don’t want them to have to throw everything out because we didn’t recognize something soon enough.”

If the T-Rex was so radical, why let it race, let the victory stand, then ban it? “Every detail of that car had been optimized, but none of it was outside the rules… So we said, we’ll let them race, then make them run on our rule book.”

After the celebrations were complete, it was a new day. Evernham went down to check on post race inspection of Gordon’s car when a NASCAR official pulled him aside and said “Don’t bring this back” Hendrick was furious “Hold on a minute, you can’t tell me one week it’s OK and then the next week tell me not to bring it back!” Evernham was also livid.

As teams prepared for next week’s Coca Cola 600, NASCAR inspectors came to Hendrick Motorsports for a closer look at the car. “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 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, that way only one car was affected.” Nelson said.

Stump said “NASCAR added about half a dozen new rules specifically to address issues raised by the T-Rex.” Nelson won’t argue. Evernham said “They were going to write new rules anyway, what we did by letting them poke around and measure everything 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 on everything else, or do we give up on this one?’ I know Rex took it hard because it was his baby. I didn’t like it at 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, 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, the race eventually won by Ricky Rudd. Gordon finished fourth.

Evernham said “We had it pretty disguised, and we had fixed a lot of the stuff that NASCAR had complained about, 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.”