*Quick Summary: The author is in charge of the race car known as “T-Rex”, and discusses his involvement with it.*
I am in charge of the race car named “T-Rex”. There seems to be an increasing amount of racing lore building up about the car, so I thought I’d share my history with it. If you’re reading this on my obscure little site, I’m assuming you’re either my mom, or someone else that has already heard of and/or searched the Internet for info on the car, so I’ll spare you all that backstory.
Obviously, I saw the car race in the 1997 All-Star race like everybody else. That was my first time knowing for sure it existed. I’d heard rumors before then, but not many and not often. Like you, most of what I know about the car came well after the race.
It seems the current buzz has the car becoming increasingly more dominant in people’s memory of the race as time goes on, but the fact remains the car performed pretty well. It didn’t win all the segments as some remember, but it did good. Maybe Jeff Gordon was sandbagging a bit, maybe he wasn’t? Who knows? Probably only Jeff and Ray Evernham. The fact remains, NASCAR didn’t like the car, and made some changes to the rule book after the race to ensure certain parts of it wouldn’t return.
The next time I saw the car, it was a year or more later and the guys from the #24 shop were bringing it over to my shop, telling me it was mine to take care of now. That wasn’t terribly rare. Being Showcar Manager and Co-Manager of the racing museum, through the years, my employees and I have taken receipt of the most successful cars in Hendrick Motorsports history. T-Rex was just one more of those we had to figure out what to do with. Like all of those previous cars, it was destined to go to the Museum, be used as a showcar, or be warehoused and stored for a while. Those were pretty much the only options then. I was working under Papa Joe Hendrick, and when it came to decisions like this, he was the guiding force. We not-so-affectionately referred to it by its dash number in the #24 shop, car 2429. The 29th car in their inventory. 2429 is not the chassis number, as has been reported by some, but the car number for keeping track of cars/records in the shop. In my department, we would call it “2429” or by its Asset ID number 1513, and rarely/occasionally, “Rex” or “T-Rex”.
It had already been re-painted as a DuPont rainbow paint scheme when we got it. Because of the fresh rainbow paint, we made a decision to use it as showcar. It would save us a lot of money by giving us another rainbow showcar for our fleet. NASCAR showcars are the retired race cars teams don’t use any more for one reason or another. Those showcars travel the country for sponsor/client events, and are used in photo/video shoots when the actual race cars aren’t needed. The best showcar departments make every effort to have the most current looking cars in an effort to bring the most realistic representation of racing to our clients. In the case of T-Rex, it had most of the pieces and parts it last raced with, so it was easy to make it into a showcar. The contingency decals and a few of the other sponsor logos on it were not current, so we swapped those out, and prepared it for its new life on the road.
It didn’t take long to see it wasn’t an average race car. In fact, the first time my showcar driver tied it down, he broke something. He came in to my office to tell me he needed some help, and I went out to his trailer with him. I could see one side of the car sagging a bit, and I followed my driver as he began to crawl under the car. There I saw what I was not expecting to see – only a 1/4″ bolt holding the rear shock to a broken shock mount. My driver ran his tie-down strap around the rear end, but had it leaning against the shock bracket, and when he tried to ratchet it down, he ripped the bracket off the car. Oh my goodness, what had we gotten ourselves into? Clearly this wasn’t anything we’d seen before. Typically, the hardware to mount shocks is much more substantial. In fact, I’d never seen a broken shock mount on one of these cars before. I called my shop guys out to the trailer to look at it, and they got the mount fixed and beefed up a little, but more importantly, attached loops on the underside for the showcar drivers to tie the car down so that wouldn’t happen again in the future.
There were other issues through the couple of years we used it as a showcar. Always with things breaking that wouldn’t ordinarily break on other cars. It’s important to note, I never saw the car in its original as-raced form. The car we got had already been modified and tested, modified and tested, since the 1997 Winston. Some of the raced parts were still there, some weren’t. There were still so many lightweight components on the car that were designed solely to race, not to be hauled cross-country, bouncing in a trailer, loaded and unloaded multiple times a day, and all the other things we did with it. Far more “trick” parts than we’d ever seen on one car before. We weren’t privy to all the changes that had been made, we just knew it would break more often than our other cars, as it was less inclined to handle the rough treatment we’d give it. Now that isn’t saying the car was “weak” or “bad” in any way, because it sure wasn’t. It’s just saying that we couldn’t count all the ways this thing was different from what we had experience with, and we simply didn’t have the time or inclination to reverse-engineer it to see. We certainly had the know-how and ability, but we didn’t have the time. There was a job to do, so if something broke, we’d fix it, and try to keep from having it break again. That was it. Putting out the occasional proverbial fire instead of taking time we didn’t have to prevent the fire from starting in the first place.
When it came time re-body our fleet of showcars to the next body style, decisions were made on each of the cars in inventory. Some would travel down the hill to the racing museum, some would be re-bodied, some restored, and some would be put in the warehouse for a while and dealt with later. If it had the original Jurassic Park paint scheme, Ol’ Rexy would’ve been put in the museum as soon as we got it. It never would’ve been used as a showcar, but we weren’t about to let that nice rainbow paint scheme go to waste, so we did shows with it. We knew we couldn’t re-body it, as that would strip the car of too much value. It mostly just needed paint and decals to be “restored”, but that was a tall task at the time. Now confronted with re-bodying most of the rest of the fleet of showcars, and knowing that meant re-painting them all to the current schemes as well, the best option at the time was to put 2429 back in the corner of our warehouse, cover it, and revisit the paint job another day. That day wouldn’t come for a few more years.
The car sat in the back corner of the warehouse for years. Covered, still rainbow colored, occasionally with flat tires, but just sitting there. To almost everyone still at HMS, T-Rex was just a memory. The only people that remembered where it was were those of us who had to pump up its tires and sweep around it every so often. We finally reached a little lull in work after one of the busiest “off-seasons” we’d ever had, and my mind went back to T-Rex. I asked my boss if she thought it would be a good idea if we restored it, and she immediately agreed. She oversees the Museum, and I am a Co-Manager there as well as my job in Showcars, so for us it would be a double benefit – we’d finally free up that warehouse space we desperately needed, and we’d have a cool new car for the Museum. Win/Win!
That set us on the task of restoring it, and again, that would happen in my department. The race teams build race cars, they don’t generally restore old cars or paint showcars. They’re just too busy, and it is a distraction from what they’re hired to do, which is (hopefully) win races. So off we go. As I mentioned, it was pretty complete when it arrived from the race team, and anything it was missing had already been replaced. The main effort was simply paint and decals. Easy! Or was it? Imagine our surprise when our decal supplier told us they didn’t have the artwork for it! All of the graphic files had been lost, and we had nothing to re-create it from. Or did we? The idea to use a die-cast car, a t-shirt, and whatever photos we could find launched what had to be one of the more creative re-creation attempts that I’ve been a part of. One day there may be thousands of clear photos of T-Rex on the Internet, but just a couple of years ago, there were not. The decal company somehow made the decals, scaled them, got mock-ups dialed in on the real car, and reproduced them all from photos, a 1:24 scale car, and a t-shirt. Very impressive!
When people ask me what was different about T-Rex, I usually tell them while pointing at my knee – “Everything from here down”, and that is pretty accurate. It was/still is a revolutionary machine, even as many of the things that made it so are now commonplace. The engineering was incredible. Every part was designed to do its job just enough, but nothing was over-engineered. Light weight took precedence over durability. At least beyond what was expected in a normal race. The goal seemed clear: T-Rex was built to last just enough miles to win the race by as much as necessary over 2nd place. A rocket ship in an era that wasn’t quite ready for space flight. With good reason Ray Evernham usually gets most of the credit for T-Rex, but it was truly a team effort. Behind-the-scenes, many people in the chassis and engineering departments deserve acclaim too. Nothing is done here by yourself. It’s all a team effort. Those behind-the-scenes folks are the ones who fostered and constructed the ideas Ray and the #24 team made work on the race track in that race. Without those folks, T-Rex wouldn’t exist. Rex Stump, his co-workers, and others conceived and built a spectacular race car. Certainly worthy of some hype. It’s just funny to me to see the hype increasing as time goes on.
I’ll pop back in and update this if I see new articles in the years ahead:
http://www.hendrickmotorsports.com/news/articles/9391/hms-chassis-no-2429-aka-t-rex
Added May, 2018: http://www.hendrickmotorsports.com/news/articles/90194/the-true-story-behind-the-legendary-t-rex
Added May, 2018: https://youtu.be/XQ-FS4pOCaE
Added May, 2018: https://racingnews.co/2018/05/17/t-rex-race-car-nascar-banned-ray-evernham/
Added Oct, 2019 (mostly true, except for the showcar part): https://youtu.be/9jAdLN3Uars
Added August, 2020: https://racingnews.co/2020/08/02/t-rex-the-car-that-was-banned-by-nascar-evernham-details-why/
Added August, 2020: https://youtu.be/7d2Uf5JpOis
