Inquisition Power guru Wayne Hennessey

‘I was like Cortez burning ships’ Hennessey Performance is 30 years old – boss John enthuses about what’s next.

JOHN HENNESSEY CEO, HENNESSEY PERFORMANCE ENGINEERING

Inquisition: meet the driving force behind the Hennessey phenomenon

Thirty years ago, John Hennessey launched a tuning business from home. Today Hennessey Performance Engineering cars have beaten Bugatti speed records, sold to Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Ford’s Jim Farley, and routinely blitz the drag strip outside Hennessey’s 51,000sq ft Texas headquarters.

Dreaming big and working out details later has put some speedbumps in the road, but there’s a likeable freewheeling style to how Hennessey does business: he decided the Dodge Demon needed a rival called the Exorcist before he knew what the Exorcist was (answer: a 1000bhp, 217mph ZL1 Camaro). The Exige-based Venom GT was a mere sketch when a customer ordered one. The real thing hit a world-record 270mph.

The Venom F5 celebrates Hennessey’s three decades in business. The hypercar has been designed from the ground-up in conjunction with Delta Motorsport at Silverstone, and will dwarf everything Hennessey’s done before: 1792bhp, 1360kg, a target top speed of 311mph, $2.1m price. Just 24 will be built. Given that Hennessey is synonymous with ridiculously powerful US muscle cars, it’s rather surprising to learn it all started with a Mitsubishi 3000 GTO.

‘In the late ’80s I was fascinated by Group B rally cars and Pikes Peak, and the Porsche 959 was my dream car,’ he tells CAR. ‘My environmental clean-up business made some money; I thought I could modify the Mitsubishi and make it my poor man’s version of the Porsche 959.’

Hennessey entered Pikes Peak and Nevada Open Road Challenge races in 1991, and turned to modifying customer cars to pay the bills – initially it was ‘anything that came through the door’, mostly Japanese imports. Then, in 1993, one of the first Dodge Viper owners asked Hennessey to add safety modifications for the Silver State Road Race. Hennessey agreed, but thought the V10 could use more poke. ‘It had a lot of torque, but I wondered what would it feel like with another 100 horsepower,’ he remembers. ‘That’s kind of the fix we’ve been doing for 30 years.’

Hennessey built his brand around the Viper from 1993 to around 2000, and it was with a twin-turbo example that Hennessey beat the Bugatti Veyron from zero to 200mph by four seconds in a Road & Track test. The challenge was where to go next. ‘Around 2007 I started thinking that adding more horsepower isn’t always the answer,’ he explains.

The ingenious solution was to add more horsepower and lose weight. Hennessey looked at Ford GTs and Corvettes, and soon learned that ‘if you lighten a car by, say, around 200 pounds it goes from street car to race real quickly. We looked at how we could have 1000bhp in a car that weighs 2000lb (907kg), and we joked around thinking what a Lotus Exige would look like if we put our twin-turbo V10 in it.’ The Venom production car used a twin-turbo GM V8, produced 1244bhp and weighed 1244kg. ‘There was never really a business plan – we kind of jumped in without fully weighing the costs. I was like Cortez burning the ships. We had to make it work, but we built a dozen Venom GTs,’ says Hennessey. ‘That was a nice challenge in terms of really stretching our capabilities.’

Like the Venom GT, the Venom F5 has been developed with Delta Motorsport, but this time it’s new from the ground up. Based around a carbonfibre tub, it uses a mid-mounted 6.6- litre twin-turbo V8, rear-drive and a far more slippery shape.

Hennessey would like to achieve ‘a little bit north of 500km/h’ (313mph), but he wants to test on the Nürburgring and is adamant the F5 should ‘be as comfortable on a proper British B-road as it would be on the autobahn at wide-open throttle’. It’s a conflicting brief for chief engineer John ‘Heinrocket’ Heinricy. Hennessey still tunes the US muscle cars that made his name, but these days his core business mirrors market trends. ‘Trucks and SUVs are 75 per cent of our business now,’ he reveals. ‘We’ve modified the Ram T-Rex that comes with the 700bhp Hellcat engine – our version is the Mammoth, and it made a little over 900bhp on the dyno last night.’

Hennessey says he’s ‘very interested’ in electrification, plans to buy a Tesla Plaid and modify EVs too, if probably not the powertrains. But he’s not convinced internal combustion is going away as quickly as some governments and manufacturers might think. The Porsche passion remains; he recently bought a new 911 Turbo S and plans to crank it up another 100bhp – that dream Porsche 959 wouldn’t see which way it went.

Six questions only we would ask

Tell us about your first car

‘An Oldsmobile 442. I took the airbox and flipped the lid upside down to get more air into the carburettor.’

What is your proudest achievement?

‘Besides being a father and husband… when the Venom GT broke 270mph, we really strived hard for that.’

Tell us about a time you screwed up

‘There were times we got behind delivering to clients, so I learned I needed a team. Now we have 53 employees.’

Best thing you’ve ever done in a car?

The first silver State Race back in 1991. I won the Unlimited Class in a car I built out of my apartment.’

Supercar or classic car?

‘Supercar. What really pushes my button is the thrill of speed – I have a McLaren 765LT.’

Curveball: Are we getting to the peak of top speed?

‘Tyres, space, focus on EVs... we’re nearing a Concorde moment. We won’t go faster than the Venom F5.’