It’s pretty obvious that NASCAR is filled with marvels of motorsports engineering. But there have been some truly standout moments in NASCAR’s history where motorsports engineering completely changed the game.
One of those moments came almost 15 years ago, during the 1997 All Star race, when Jeff Gordon took the Hendrick Motorsports Jurassic Park-themed Monte Carlo, affectionately nicknamed ‘T-Rex’, to victory lane. The Hendrick team, led by engineer Rex Stump, had completely re-engineered the beast from the ground up.
With an engineer’s zest for problem solving and design improvement, Stump posed a question to his team that everyone in a motorsports engineering school will hear at some point during their studies: if you could start from scratch, what would you do to make this car better and faster?
The car that Stump and his team designed will go down in history as a technical marvel as it debuted at Charlotte Motor Speedway in the 1997 All-Star race, then called The Winston. Although the race was fairly unexciting, with Gordon holding the car back for the first two segments and then unleashing it in the final laps to take the lead, the car itself was something that had never been seen before in NASCAR.
What made it exciting, then and now, to motorsports engineers was that the car was completely legal because most of the changes fell into the gray areas of NASCAR’s rulebook at the time. Everything from the materials the car and its parts were made of to the angle of certain components was evaluated and adjusted if needed. Some changes were minute and some were significant, but when the car went through technical inspection it passed because of Stump’s team’s careful and exact consideration of the rules.
Even NASCAR was impressed by the ingenuity in Stump’s machine, although it forced officials to rewrite the rulebook the next morning. Like many engineering feats, T-Rex was the product of creative thinking combined with technical know-how – what every motorsports engineer hopes to achieve.
