- Do you like going fast?
(zooming)
Do you like your cars loud?
(car engine)
Do you like having the most ridiculously overpowered car
on the block?
(car engine revving)
Well then, do I have a car company for you!
They handle more vipers than that guy at the zoo!
They know more about speed than Sandra Bullock!
Their cars have more horses than the Kentucky
friggin' Derby!
This is everything you need to know to get up to speed
on a Hennessey.
(video game music)
At the young age of 15, John Hennessey
got his grubby little hands on his first car,
a 1969,
(laughs)
Oldsmobile 442.
That means four-speed manual,
four-barrel carburetor, and dual exhaust.
But the 380 horsies it cranked out
weren't enough for the young Hennessey.
(upbeat music)
I'm gonna refer to Hennessey as Henny a lot,
like we're friends.
So, Henny did the first mod that any kid would do
on his carbureted big block back then.
He flipped the cover over on top of the air filter
to let in more air. Genius!
For the first chapter of his adult life,
Henny was a good old boy
in the Houston construction business.
He was running a reasonable company
that specialized in asbestos abatement.
And that's what he read an article
that piqued his interest.
A car writer by the name of C Van Tune
got an all-wheel drive -
(coughs)
got an all-wheel drive AMC Eagle,
put a roll cage in it,
and raced it up Pike's Peak.
And that got Hennessey thinking.
- Wait a minute, this is just some normal dude
racing up that hill?
I am also a normal dude
and he did it in a crappy old 190 hertz per AMC.
What if I did it in a car
that could actually haul butt?!
- As fate would have it, 1991 would be
one heck of a year for John.
He took some of that asbestos abatement money
(chuckles) that's some good money
and set out to find the perfect car
for his Pike's Peak endeavor.
At that time, Henny saw the Porsche 959
as the most advanced exotic out there.
And while it would be perfect for his little project,
a 959 is about as far from a project car
as ones can gets.
There ain't enough asbestos in the state of Texas
that could buy him that car.
So instead he wrangled the most affordable twin-turbo
all-wheel drive with active aero
and four-wheel steering that he could find.
- All-wheel drive,
four wheel steering, active aero, electronically controlled,
shocks?
- A Mitsubishi 3000GT BR4.
Wanna know more about that car?
Check out this episode. (kisses) A lot of love went into it.
Before he could charge up Pike's Peak,
he had to put a roll cage in it.
And he thought..
- While I'm here, I bet I could get some more ponies
out of this sweet 3-liter V6.
- It's 1991 and this is a new Japanese car
in Houston, Texas.
Finding performance parts for it would be like
trying to find performance parts for a 3000 GT
in 1991 in Texas. (laughs)
So Hennessey got with a few of his mechanic buddies
and one of them said that he could help him
make a higher flow exhaust.
And another was like, "Oh, hey, yo,
"I could maybe help get a little more boost
"from them turbos."
- And Hennessey thought ..
- Well, maybe I could find out the ECU and so on
and so on and so on -
- and so using the Butt Dyno
they tweaked that 3000 GT
until they thought it felt like a 959.
Pumping out and estimated 450 hearses.
In May, 1991, in preparation for the Pike's Peak challenge,
Henny loaded up some tools and spare parts
and drove his modified Mitsubishi
which he had renamed the VR 200
out to Nevada to race in the Silver State Classic.
A 91 mile race down a stretch of closed highway.
That sounds amazing. That sounds like what I'm doing
for my bachelor party
if I ever meet a girl who can stand me.
My buddy Henny finished with an average speed
of 166.3 miles per
and won the Classic
despite a run-in with a turkey vulture
that cracked his headlight.
- Vaporized that turkey vulture.
- So he drove it home where it served as his daily driver.
Two months later, Henny took his VR 200
up to Colorado to enter the big race.
The Pike's Peak hill climb.
With stock gearing and stock tires
in his own limited off-road experience.
Hennessey piloted his modified 3000 Getty
to a 10th place finish.
10th?! That's top 10!
Henny got to thinking that he might have a knack
for making fast cars
and he'd much rather be doing that
than dodging mesothelioma for a living.
To once again prove just how fast
his tuned cars would be,
he drove the VR 200 out to Bonneville
and set the F-Production/Supercharged class record
with a two-way average speed of 176 miles per-er.
The judges were like -
- There is no way that thing doesn't have a rebore.
That can not be the production engine.
No way you're getting the speeds like that
with three liters of displacement.
- Hennessey was just like -
- I sure did. Now give me my trophy, you nerd.
- Finally, they let Henny take out one of the spark plugs
with a borrowed socket wrench
and they verified his placement through the plug hole.
(chuckles)
John raced home from Bonneville to marry his fiance.
(wedding music)
John asked her if she'd be okay with him leaving
his successful asbestos business
to tune cars for a living.
She gave her blessing.
And Hennessey Performance Engineering -
(baby cries)
was born.
Then, for good measure, he went back to Silver State
and set an average speed of 177 miles per
like weeks after they got married.
In 1991, four years before Post Malone was born,
John Hennessey went from reading car mags on the toilet
to winning races, marriage, and running a tuning company.
What a year!
All the press from these races established John Hennessey
as a guy who could get cars to go fast
and it wasn't long before Hennessey Performance
was tuning Dodge Stealths and the 3000 Getty
for other people.
The Hennessey performance VR 200 package
ran 15 grand
and people loved it.
A couple years late a customer came,
knock knock knocking
and he wanted to race his own car
in the Silver State Classic
but this wasn't no 3000 GT,
it wasn't even a Dodge Stealth,
it was something Hennessey hadn't worked on before.
A little car called the, uh,
(angels singing "hallelujah")
Dodge Viper.
(hissing)
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So in 1993 Hennessey performance began development
of the HPE Dodge Viper 500,
or the DP 5-hunny like me and my friends call it.
They raced it in the Classic that year
where it placed 4th overall
and had an average speed of 164 miles per.
People had seen the Viper on showroom floors
and on posters, but this was a Viper that raced.
Not everyone could afford a Viper,
but coverage in magazines like Car and Driver
and Motortrend got people who could,
literally salivating
for a Hennessey Performance modifications.
Hennessey Performance got so good
at making after-market Viper parts
that Dodge enlisted their advice
while developing the hard top second gen Viper
that came out in 1996
just a year after the second-gen Viper rolled off
the lines in '96?
They were ready to put everything they had learned
into an amazing new tuning package.
The Hennessey Venom 650R!
(engine revving)
The 650R was one of the fastest road-legal cars
in the world.
Upgrades included a $37000 engine rebuild
that had bored-out cylinders and a longer stroke.
Hennessey Performance brought the total power output
to 650 hertz pers and an equal number of torques.
All of these modifications allowed the car
to accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per
in 3.3 seconds, complete the quarter mile in 10.8 seconds,
and reach a top speed of over 215 miles pers.
All of this could be yours for a paltry $108500.
After you buy a Viper GTS. Huh?
In his trademark, Almo raced this
so you'd buy it style.
John Hennessey - Henny for short -Piloted a 650R
round the track at the Honda proving grounds
and made it the first Viper recorded
at over 200 miles per hour
clocking a top speed of 203.
For 99, he decided it was time to develop
a twin-turbo Viper V10.
His goal for this monster dubbed the Venom 800
was 200 miles per in Standing Mile.
The 800 made a confusing 700 horse power
to the rear wheels.
In 1999, before Y2k limited all technology as we know it.
Hennessey came up just short of 200.
Hitting the mile mark at 1997 miles per,
which was still pretty good
after rocketing from 0 to 60 in 2.9 seconds.
By 2004, Hennessey Performance was looking to expand
so they purchased the Lonestar Motorsport Complex.
The complex had ample room for machining
and modifying cars and it came
with an eight mile drag strip.
This lent to some of the mystique of Hennessey Performance.
They must be great at business
if they're buying all this land
clocking all those top speeds, right?
I'll come back to that in a second.
So Hennessey performance continued
to roll out their new packages
for the Viper and along the way
they offered performance upgrades
for almost any car you can imagine.
Mustangs. Corvettes. Porsches. Audis.
Anything that you can imagine, they can make faster.
But making other peoples' cars faster
was somehow unfulfilling for the company
and its founder.
So Henny had his team begin development
of their own supercar.
The Venom GT.
Modifications to the Lotus Elite Chassis
included components from the Lotus Exige.
Carbon-fiber bodywork and carbon-fiber wheels.
They of course have Brembo brakes
that pair up with carbon-ceramic rotors.
Because you're gonna need to stop.
The 1244 buff horses coming out of
that twin-turbo seven-liter LS9 engine.
(horse neighing)
1244 buff horses in a car that weighs 1244 kilograms.
That's one buff horse per kilogram.
That's light.
Hennessey Venom GT has a top speed of 270.49 miles per-er.
In January 2013, the Venom GT set a Guinness World Record -
the book company, not the beer company
you old booze hounds -
making it the fastest road-legal car
from 0 to 186 miles per
getting there in 13.63 seconds.
By the way, 186 isn't some random number.
It's 300 kilometers per,
which is what Guinness uses.
It also set an unofficial record
for 0-200 miles per hour acceleration at 14.51 seconds
beating the Koenigsegg Agera RS time of 17.6
making it the unofficial fastest accelerating road car
in the world.
I mention that unofficial record only as a segue
into to some other things about Hennessey Performance
that seem very unofficial.
My buddy Hennessey, he was also building a reputation
among some in the car world
as an unresponsive disorganized businessman.
You know that mechanic who's had your car for months,
promising to work on it?
- Yeah man, I'll be done Tuesday.
Yep, Tuesday. Oh, did I say Tuesday?
I meant December.
December five years from now.
Yeah, it's still Tuesday but it's Tuesday
five years from now in December.
- Well, imagine that but your car is worth about 100 grand.
And you've prepaid almost that much for the work
and instead of months, it's years.
Stories abound about the mismanagement
of Hennessey Performance
and some say they waited years
for their cars and only got the runaround from John.
Others have much more serious allegations.
They claim that Hennessey would strip their car,
sell the parts, and never get around
to putting the performance ones in.
Still, even more stories exist claiming
that he rebagged crap parts with
the Hennessey logo, stick those on the car
like they were performance parts,
and bank on the owners being too dumb
to tell the difference.
Stories so crazy you'd think they have to be false
but stories so plentiful
that you wondered if they might be true.
When Hennessey listed their test track for sale in 2016
it raised a lot of eyebrows and many thought
that the Hennessey Performance reign was coming to an end,
but John Hennessey addresses all of the above
as baseless gosh darn rumors.
Hearsay, damn it!
He's copped to early complaints,
saying he over-promised and that he wasn't
running his business right,
but he swears that today, things are tip tippity top.
He says the eight mile test strip was for sale
to put some money back into company operations
and growth without needing a loan.
It's since been taken off the market.
He also firmly stands by his intent
to fulfill all orders put into his shop.
Perhaps he's a better mechanic than a businessperson.
Hennessey claims no need for alarm.
He's just a bit slower than he'd like to be
and there's a lot in the tuning world
that's out of his control.
What's true? I don't know.
But I can tell you that it's difficult
to get past Hennessey Performance's sleek exterior.
I mean, the amount of unreal cars
that they have turned out is mind boggling.
The Velociraptor making 600 horsepower,
a Cadillac Wagon making 750,
Mustangs cranking out over 800,
and if you're not into demons,
there's the Hennessey Exorcist.
The Exorcist is an upgrade package
for the Chevy Camaro ZL1.
The Package cranks out 1000 hertz pers.
I heard that the wiper fluid is holy water
and the horn is just a guy yelling
"The power of Christ compels you!"
And Hennessey isn't finished
building their own cars, neither.
The successors in the Venom GT, the Venom F5,
was unveiled at SEMA in 2017.
To say that expectations for the Hennessey Venom follow-up
are high would be an understatement.
With chief engineer, John Heinricy,
Hennessey is shooting for a world-beating speed record
from a yet-unfinished American hyper car.
Using its projected two-second 0 to 60 acceleration
and 301 mile per hour top speed,
they're hoping to eclipse the legendary Bugatti Chiron
and the Koenigsegg Agera on almost
every measurable speed metric.
The Venom F5 will contain Hennessey's first ever
proprietary twin turbo V8.
(burps)
Is the F5 just a bunch of vaporware?
I hope not.
The car sounds so amazing, you want it to be real.
(engine revving)
Which is a good way of summing up Hennessey Performance.
When the F5 finally launches, each car will cost
$1.6 million bones.
How's that for a business plan?
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