SPEED will televise the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race XXIV and the NASCAR Sprint Showdown live on May 17, as well as provide more than 90 hours of support programming prior to the event. Stay tuned to SPEEDtv.com for frequent updates... » More Photos

“The car had a lot of different construction features: the way the floor pan and the frame rails were in it,” said Evernham. “The car had an aerodynamic advantage and a mechanical suspension advantage. Rex is a pretty smart guy. He just took everything to the maximum, and it ended up being a pretty nice race car. A lot of the suspension components and things like that that are illegal now were all built within the rules then. We had trailing arms with springs in them, all kinds of stuff, but there were no rules about that at that time.”

The only race such a set-up could succeed in was The Winston. The strategy was genius on two fronts: First off, it worked—Gordon’s car was not especially good in the tow 30-lap preliminary segments, but it won the 10-lap sprint at the end, as Gordon easily fended off brothers Bobby and Terry Labonte to score an easy victory.

Second, it was a brilliant diversionary move.

Other crew chiefs who saw the car were outraged and stormed into the NASCAR trailer demanding the T-Rex be banned. If not, they’d have to figure out how to replicate the same design in their own cars. The media bought into all the talk that Evernham was cheating and that there were all kinds of trick parts on the car.

And Evernham, who had built a car for one race and one race only, got to publicly wring his hands that NASCAR was setting back his R&D program when it announced after race that it had changed the rules to prevent the T-Rex from ever running again. The reason, Nelson would say later, was simple: “We look at three things. First, does it give an unfair performance advantage? No, it doesn’t, because the car wouldn’t race anywhere else. Second, is it unsafe? No, there was nothing inherently unsafe about it. Third, does it cost too much? And there’s where we had to draw the line, because if every other competitor had to go out and build a car like this, it would drive the price of racing up too high.”

Of course, at the time nobody other than Hendrick Motorsports officials and NASCAR officials fully understood that the T-Rex was never intended to be used anywhere other than All-Star race. Evernham played up NASCAR’s banning of the T-Rex to maximum advantage with the racing media.

“With the new rules [banning the design] the car was just no good,” Evernham told reporters, claiming the T-Rex was a prototype for the team’s 1998 chassis. “It has put us a year behind with our chassis program. While we were sent back to the drawing board it has forced us to run a lot of older cars during the first part of the ’98 season.”

Having won The Winston and then bamboozled the media and his competitors about his intentions afterwards, Evernham recovered from being put “a year behind with our chassis program.” His driver, Gordon, went on to claim Sprint Cup championships that season and again in 1998, when he won a record-tying 13 races.

And the T-Rex earned a spot in NASCAR history.

Tom Jensen is the Senior NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers

Do In Pursuit of SPEED,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the President of the National Motorsports Press Association. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com. Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to

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SPEED will televise the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race XXIV and the NASCAR Sprint Showdown live on May 17, as well as provide more than 90 hours of support programming prior to the event. Stay tuned to SPEEDtv.com for frequent updates on the history of the event and all the details about this year’s action.
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