Stump is still reticent to talk in great detail about the car. But we followed that by saying, 'Remember, we do control the rules. "We looked at our rulebook and looked at the car and said it was not outside the parameters of the rulebook.
T REX SPORTS CAR SERIES
"It was like, 'Give it to Ray, he'll try anything.'"īecause 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. "I was kind of like Mikey from the cereal commercials," Evernham said. Evernham, long a champion for the R&D effort, showed keen interest. "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. "I got back there and saw that car, looked underneath it and everything," Hendrick 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. 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.
"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." He had always been an avid reader."I would read the rulebook and try to find the gray areas," Garde said.
T REX SPORTS CAR HOW TO
"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. "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. By early 1997, Stump's racing laboratory had come up with a big idea. "It was kind of like our own 'Area 51'," Evernham said. In January of '96, engineer Rex Stump was hired and put in charge of an R&D program Hendrick vowed to leave alone. He won his first championship with Gordon in 1995 and would get another title in '96 with Terry Labonte. "Nobody had a research-and-development program, and you really didn't have time to try stuff and race at the same time." 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. Rick Hendrick became a Winston Cup car owner in 1984. It began, as all great legends do, a long, long time ago. "`Don't bring this car back.'" T-Rex was extinct. "He said, `I'm gonna give you a tip,'" Evernham said. 24 Chevrolet, a NASCAR official pulled him aside. When Evernham went to check on post-race inspection of the No. But by the time he and crew chief Ray Evernham had finished celebrations and interviews, it was a new day. Jeff Gordon had won The Winston on Saturday night, May 17, 1997.
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