The "bad to the bone" NASCAR dinosaur way ahead of its time

As the 1997 NASCAR Cup season approached its mid-point, Jeff Gordon and a dinosaur would be just about the most dramatic juxtaposition you could put together in motorsport at that time - the first a mid-20s upstart at the height of his powers and the latter, extinct.

But a certain Hollywood movie and a team and driver willing to push the envelope brought the two together as NASCAR history was created that season. The Chevrolet Monte Carlo in question was named T-Rex and it was about to change everything.

Gordon burst onto the scene in 1992 and, after his third full season of competition in the Cup Series in 1995, he and his Hendrick Motorsports team had changed the face of stock car racing forever.

Gordon's California good lucks, perfect sponsor regurgitation in victory lane and unmatched pace out on the track turned him and the #24 team - nicknamed the 'Rainbow Warriors' due to their paint scheme initiated by longstanding backer DuPont - into a marketing machine destined for the cereal boxes and backpacks of America.

From a series traditionally dominated by moustachioed, tobacco chewing pick-up drivers, the revolutionary team gave NASCAR a smarter, cleaner image which would transform it into the business and marketing-driven juggernaut it is today.

After Gordon sealed the 1995 Daytona 500 - becoming the youngest driver ever to do so at the time - he and Hendrick marched on to the title that year, and then narrowly missed out in 1996.

But come the 1997 All-Star race - a one week break in championship competition where champions of NASCAR and Daytona were entered into a short shootout for cash in Charlotte - the crew was already on its way to righting the wrong of the year before and a title was seemingly on the way.

But first, we must rewind to 1996 and a meeting in Rick Hendrick's shop. The eponymous team owner - far too often incorrectly seen as a mere figurehead and not given credit for the role he has played in his team's domination of recent NASCAR history - was not content with the way his engineer Rex Stump and aerodynamicist Gary Aker had excelled. Not content with Gordon's crew chief Ray Evernham revolutionising the pitstop by bringing in ex-American Footballers to shave time off the wait spent in the box. Not content with the team pretty much reinventing NASCAR in a three-year period.

Like all greats, Hendrick wanted more.

He called a shop meeting and asked all the heads of department, if they had a blank sheet of paper, how they would create the perfect race car. The result was T-Rex.

"What I remember is a lot of buzz and excitement about a new car that had a lot of innovative features," Gordon tells Autosport, "and was different from how we had built cars in the past.

"It wasn't extreme or crazy, it was just trying to package everything in a better way and to create more speed.

"It stands out a lot because I'm constantly reminded about that car. When I'm signing a diecast model, they often ask, 'What about the T-Rex car'."

Gordon went as much as one second quicker than the field and if he'd kept that up for the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte the following weekend - sans caution flags - he'd have finished more than five minutes clear

It was a technological marvel in NASCAR. It featured the dipped front end we see on the cars today that creates downforce, which was capitalised on by a new floor. The centre of gravity was brought as low as possible, even to the extent of moving the fuel tank, which meant that getting to any parts in the rear end was a nightmare. Throw in a stiffer chassis, streamlined aero on the body of the car and stiffer suspension, and on paper it was a rocket.

But when the car broke cover, it was a dinosaur. Put simply, it was trash.

"It was started in 1996 because we had T-Rex pretty early in the 1997 year, we took it to Texas, that would have been March or April," says Evernham (below, left). "We tried it, the #5 car [Terry Labonte, 1996 champion] tried it, nobody really liked it! The car just didn't work.

"Then one day we were screwing around with it at Charlotte and I said, 'Let me try some things with this car', and we changed a bunch of things that I had always wanted to try.

"We started to think about putting a completely different set-up in T-Rex. The set-up in T-Rex that night [at the All-Star race] was so completely different than anything we'd ever run, it was a huge, huge gamble for us. We didn't know what the hell was going to happen."

It took a lot of work, but on that day tinkering with the setup at Charlotte, Evernham effectively defined the ethos of the modern stock car. Fiddling with suspension spring load rates and installing a bigger sway bar are the foundations that unlocked the T-Rex's ferocious speed. But it would take a while for the public to see it.

By the time it was decided the Monte Carlo would be rolled out for the All-Star race on May 17, it did at least have its name. Hendrick had signed a deal for the #24 car to be sponsored by the latest Jurassic Park film - The Lost World: Jurassic Park, a woeful follow-up, this writer can add, to the original masterpiece - and thus it rolled out of the garage to the public featuring T-Rexs dotted all over.

Combined with lead engineer Stump's first name, T-Rex seemed like the perfect combination, and in what is probably the most unsuitable name for a car ever given the technological advancement on display compared with the prehistoric animal that adorned its panels, it had an enticing quality.

Qualifying is basically pointless in the All-Star race, but Gordon didn't quite nail the lap anyway and started the race - which was split into three sections of 30, 30 then 10 laps - from the back.

That meant when it came to the race, nobody knew the potential of T-Rex - perhaps apart from Gordon: "I knew I had an awesome race car, man that thing is bad to the bone," he says. "I drove into the first turn and that thing stuck like glue. I said 'Oh yeah, here we come, man.'"

The Rainbow Warriors soon knew that, like the film, they had created a monster so strong they would struggle to control it. The T-Rex moved up and down the race track at will, and at the circuit local to all of the NASCAR teams, where all have tested countless laps, Gordon went as much as one second quicker than the field on the 1.5-mile oval.

If he'd kept that up for the whole Coca-Cola 600 - also at Charlotte the following weekend, sans caution flags - he'd have finished more than five minutes clear of the opposition on a NASCAR oval race. The pace was mind boggling.

After driving from the back of the grid to third in the first segment, Gordon was understandably bullish.

"When the car's as fast as this, there's no way I'm going to hold back, I'm going to go all the way," he recalls. "We're going to be even better in this second segment here."

He went to the back again in the second segment but bounced back, and in the third segment he started fourth, had the lead within two laps and checked out over the next nine tours to absolutely destroy the opposition.

Remember, the All-Star race is made up of ex-champions and Daytona 500 winners. And Gordon humbled the lot, winning the $207,500 prize money, or $330,000+ in current wonga.

"How much money did we win, man?!" screamed Gordon in victory lane. "Show me the money!

"We're going to call this the T-Rex mobile right here because Rex Stump and all the guys back in the R&D department built this chassis, and we're going to name it after him. To do what we did, come from the back to the front twice, then to win that thing was awesome."

While fans at home failed to realise what they had witnessed and instead watched in awe of the achievement in front of them, there was fury in the paddock. Not everyone was enjoying the formation of a NASCAR legend.

"We went and won 13 races in 1998 with basically what was the T-Rex car and the implementations we'd made on it" Jeff Gordon

"We stayed in touch with NASCAR all though the build process so the car was 100% legal at that time," says crew chief Evernham.

"When we won the race, there was a line of car owners at the NASCAR trailer, hollerin' and jumping up and down and complaining that T-Rex was going to make everything in their fleet obsolete. Which they were probably right, it would have made our own fleet obsolete to be honest!

"NASCAR made the judgement call that the best thing to do for racing was to change some of the rules that T-Rex was built by.

"Mr France [the late Bill France Jr, then head of NASCAR] called for me - we were friends - I thought he wanted to congratulate me and have a beer and talk about the race. I went in the truck and this was before cell phones obviously, they had a hardline phone, where Bill sat at his desk.

"He said, 'Raymond, you need to pick up that phone right there and tell your boss that that car is illegal'. I said, 'No sir, it's not illegal, it fits all of the rules'. He said, 'It won't tomorrow!'"

Evernham laughs after the last comment, but it was clear that at the time there was aggravation from the Hendrick side as well as from the rival team owners.

"So he was pretty much telling me, 'Don't bring that car back, we're going to rewrite the rules and it's going to be different'," adds Evernham. "I get it, I didn't like it, I think Rick Hendrick liked it less because he'd spent a lot of time and money developing it.

"When I look back on it now, that car was so much faster. It would have sent everybody scrambling, including us, to build a bunch more. I get it, but that was it. T-Rex was one and done. It has become an incredible urban legend. The story has actually gotten bigger and bigger every year, when you think it's over 20 years since we did that."

However, the T-Rex Monte Carlo wasn't the one of its kind wiped out by the asteroid, never to be seen again. It was the kind that evolved, like the birds and crocodiles that descend from the now extinct species of dinosaurs before.

Following the All-Star race, the T-Rex Monte Carlo went into a museum and Gordon stuck around to win the Coca-Cola 600 at the same track the next weekend, adding another six wins that year on his way to the title. A year later, Gordon and the team were in outrageous form; he and Evernham agree on the main reason for that.

"We went and won 13 races in 1998 with basically what was the T-Rex car and the implementations we'd made on it," reveals Gordon.

Evernham adds: "We won 10 races in 1997 plus the championship and then in 1998 we won 13 races and the championship again. A lot of the front-end geometry and the front-end stiffness, where the pick-up points were and the things we learned that one night from T-Rex I think were tremendous, tremendous.

"If you look at how we finished 1997 and went into 1998, I'd look back and say the direction we took with our cars and setting them up and how we were building them after that was largely learned from T-Rex."

T-Rex might have been a one-off legend, killed off in its prime by a stronger beast - NASCAR. But it gave birth to one of stock cars' most successful runs in its history, with Gordon, Evernham, Stump and the whole Hendrick operation over the next 36 months. Gordon should have won the 1996 and 2000 titles, and did win in 1995, 1997, 1998 and 2001.

Evernham credits Hendrick for the idea and Stump for the execution of the car build alongside aerodynamicist Eaker, while Evernham himself deserves huge credit for the unlocking and refinement of the T-Rex's potential. But there was one final player who had a big part, bigger than perhaps he gets credit for.

"The car would have been fast with anybody else in it. But I just don't think it would have been fast enough to be outlawed on the first night," laughs Evernham, playing up Gordon's role in how quickly the car was banned.

"T-Rex was a good car and it was fast. But maybe another driver wouldn't have put it out there as much or been willing to go that fast, I don't know.

"I look back at that thinking Jeff was right there at what I think was one of the greatest times of his driving. He got a car that he enjoyed putting on the edge and driving it hard. He laid down those laps there that were just amazing.

"If anyone other than Jeff Gordon had been driving that car that night, it might not have gone the same way, as fast. Jeff was at the height of his career then, sitting on top of the world. It really was fond memories, a good racing story."

Still, 20 years on, its one of NASCAR's best racings stories, and newly revealed facts, conspiracies and nonsense in equal measure are introduced into folklore each year.

Perhaps the most unbelievable fact is that T-Rex contributed to the incredible $1.030billion box office takings for The Lost World: Jurassic Park, produced on a $63million budget. Even Hendrick's miracle work can't top that.

Pictures courtesy of NASCAR, Hendrick Motorsports and Charlotte Motor Speedway.