John Hennessey
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And I come back from the honeymoon and I'm looking at my bank balance and I'm like, man, I used to have a lot more money in the bank earlier this year before I started all this car stuff and continuing the romance and buying a house and so on and so forth. And I mentioned this to some racing buddy of mine. He's like, oh, you just learned the first rule of car racing. I said, what's that?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
He says, if you want to make a small fortune in car racing, you start with a larger fortune. And so this whole year I'm watching my bank balances. Well, I'm not watching it because I know what it's doing and I don't want to be reminded that it's going in the wrong direction because I was having fun. At which point I thought to myself, well, I really like the car business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I really like modifying cars. I think I'm pretty good at it. I think I'm a pretty good driver. I want to keep doing some of the racing. And I thought, you know, guys before me, guys like Carroll Shelby with Ford, a guy named Alois Roof, who's still alive, who's a very famous Porsche modifier, who I'd started reading about back when I was at the magazine rack when I was nine years old.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And another gentleman from here in the US, a guy named Reeves Calloway, who modified Corvettes and Chevrolet products. Those guys seemed to have made a career out of modifying cars for other people. And I thought,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
i wonder if people would pay me to modify their mitsubishi 3000 gt or other vehicles so came back from the honeymoon told my wife i said you know i think i want to start this car business to modify cars for other people and she's like you want to do what So I stated to her, just like, okay, all right, well, that's okay. Let's do that. And so that was October of 1991.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
So here we are almost 35 years in October of this year, the anniversary of our business and our marriage are kind of within a few weeks of each other. So yeah, now here we are almost 17,000 modified vehicles later. But I guess it does start with that entrepreneurial spirit, that spirit of I have a dream. I think I can do something. I don't know how I'm going to get there.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I don't know who's going to help me do it. But I think it starts with that passion, that desire that there is always that degree of unknown that And I won't say for me there's ever the fear. I think I get more excited about the unknown than I do the fear of it. I do try to at least be a little bit more deliberate in terms of trying to understand what do I know and what do I not know.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
But back in those days, I would definitely jump before I would look, you know, leap before I would look. But I think that there's something to that. I was watching, I was just getting over the flu and I was kind of watching some reruns of a TV show called Hell on Wheels. And it's about the Wild West and these guys that built the railroad after the Civil War.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And I think there's kind of a certain American spirit, whether it's amongst racers or people before us to where as entrepreneurs, when we have an idea and a passion for something that ultimately that passion and that desire to create a car or a business surrounding some idea or product or service, it's that passion that can carry us through the unknowns, carry us through
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
setbacks and failures and things of that nature. So after 35 years of that, you know, I can talk at length about the entrepreneur. I do other podcasts about car stuff all the time, but I think it's fun for me to kind of, because I'm just as equally as passionate, maybe even not more passionate about entrepreneurship and what goes into creating a business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
For sure. Yeah, let me talk to that. So for the early years, we had our first child in 94. So we had a couple, three years with no kids. So back in the early days, it was just, I'm answering the phone. I've got one or two mechanics. And we would pretty much work on anything that came in the door. And as I recall back in those days, We ran a small ad in a magazine called Turbo Magazine.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
But another interesting thing that was very, very helpful to the business, and I didn't know it early on, is so when I went to Bonneville, interestingly enough, so when I was telling you about the gentleman who raced the Eagle Talent at Pikes Peak, his name was C. Van Toon.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Van ended up becoming a friend, and Van ended up becoming the editor at Motor Trend from the mid-'90s up until the early 2000s. So he was a very accomplished journalist and was the editor-in-chief at Motor Trend for maybe five, six, seven years. So I first met Van because before I went to Pikes Peak, I sent a letter to the head of Mitsubishi Motors in the United States, a guy named Dick Rakia.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Maybe it started when my dad was younger and I'm the first born child and he had a 1964 Pontiac GTO muscle car. And I'm told that I would sit in his lap and he would let me drive and shift through the gears. So I think it started before I could remember.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I don't know where I found this guy's name, but when I was young, I was feeling 10 feet tall and bulletproof. So I'm thinking, I'm just going to go to Pikes Peak for the first time and I'm going to win my class. So I sent this guy a letter inviting him to come to Pikes Peak to watch me win. Wow. Amazing. Ignorance is bliss.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And so I got a nice letter back after Pikes Peak from the public relations department at Mitsubishi saying, hey, Mr. Reiki was busy and was not able to attend Pikes Peak, but we would like to send a journalist. We hear you're going to Bonneville now.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
We want to send a journalist to Bonneville to do an article about you for the Mitsubishi magazine that they would send out to all of their car dealers. And so I'm at Bonneville, and this is kind of a funny story. I'm at Bonneville. One of the rules of Bonneville is when you have a car at Bonneville, when you're in the pit area, so the area where the cars are being worked on,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Their rule is that car has to be towed. It can't be driven, okay, for safety reasons. And I had read that in the rule book. I drove there, so I didn't have like a truck or something to tow it around. And so one of the people that worked at the race, they warned me. They're like, look, you can't drive that in here.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Well, he came up on me another time, saw me driving around, and we were getting ready to get into a fight because I'm like, look, dude, I've explained to you I don't have a tow vehicle. Here comes this minivan and out pops these two guys. One guy works for Mitsubishi. His name is Joe Jacuzzi. We became friends then and we're still friends to this day. His dad invented the hot tub.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And he worked in the public relations department at Mitsubishi. And he brought the journalist to write the article, See Van Tune. And so these guys were like, oh, they kind of diffused the situation. And they were like, oh, we're going to help John. We've got the minivan over here. We can tow him around.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I'm telling you this whole long story is Joe was been within the PR department at Mitsubishi for a few years. And he said, after Bonneville, he says, Hey, look, after Bonneville, why don't you come down to LA? I'll take you around and I'll introduce you to like the editor at Motor Trend and the one editors at Car and Driver. And I'm like, wow, I've read about these guys.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And he said, Hey, by the way, If they like you and if they ever ask to do a story on one of your vehicles and they write something nice about your vehicle, your phone will ring and people want to buy your product. I'm like, okay, that sounds good. So went and did all that and gave my car to a couple of these different media outlets and
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And a couple months later, this nice little article came out and my phone started ringing. I didn't know what earned media was. I didn't know what PR was. But my friend Joe, and again, we talk all the time. We're still friends to this day. He just retired as the VP of communications for Chevrolet. So he's been in the car industry most of his career.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
So it's something that's been, you know, now 62 years later, I've been programmed into my DNA and now my kids, and now we had our first grandchild a few weeks ago. So maybe in his DNA as well.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
But Joe taught me a very, very valuable lesson very early on that This is before the internet. This is before YouTube, social media. So car magazines, they could make you or break you back in the day. So I would just foster relationships with these guys. Anytime over the years, they would call me up and say, hey, we need a fast car to do XYZ. I was always... Yes, I'll do it. Yes, I'll do it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Yes, I'll do it. But for those first five years of the business, our bank balance never fluctuated much above $15,000 and not much below $5,000. And all I'm trying to do is just make enough money to help pay our house payment and get to the next race. Well, then after our first child came along, I'm like, all right, I got to make this into a real business. This can't be a hobby business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
But for those first five years, I kept thinking, is this the year that cool cars is out? Is this the year that people are like, you know, fast cars, that's just kind of a fad. I'm ready to move on to something else. And that's kind of what I thought for the first five years. But over time, I thought we kept getting more notoriety.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And then a vehicle came along, the Dodge Viper, and we started modifying the Viper, which was a pretty radical car back in the 90s, a V10 with 400 plus horsepower, and we took it to 500 horsepower and beyond. So we got a lot, a lot, a lot of media coverage. I'm talking about dozens of car magazines and many, many covers. I mean, probably dozens of covers of magazines.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And people seem to kind of know who we were. So this is maybe now we're five, seven years into this. And I thought, are we a brand? Are we starting to become a brand? People seem to kind of know who we are. And at the time, different automotive companies, I would read about brand managers. It was kind of a term that they used back then.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I thought, well, maybe I need to be my brand manager and make sure that our cars look a certain way and perform a certain way, which they always did well. And so I think maybe over time... I realized that the compounding effect of this media coverage in building good cars for clients, we were building a brand. And so we started to treat it as such.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Nowadays, if you've got a great product or service, Social media allows people to accelerate how quickly the world learns about that. But again, I found of our almost 35-year journey that it probably took us those first 10 to 15 years just to build a name, just to gain credibility in the marketplace. And I think that's been a very, very important foundation for what we've done.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
No, I don't think there was ever a moment where... I'd considered changing businesses, changing careers. There's nothing else that I wanted to do. I wanted to be a pilot when I was young. Actually, I'm getting ready to, I started taking flying lessons in my mid-20s, and I finished all the ground courses, got straight A's, and I ran out of money after flying eight hours.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And today, after our podcast, I'm taking my first flight lesson to finish getting my pilot's license almost 40 years, well, 30 something years later. So anyway, you being in this truck, I may pick your brain from time to time. But anyway, no, there was never anything else that either interested me or that I felt like I had a calling or a skill set. I'm sure I could have done other things.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I could have done sales or creative things or business things, but automotive was always my number one passion.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Yeah, I felt like we have a gift there, not just for me personally. I mean, I've got my skills and talents, but I always felt like I could identify and attract talent within our organization. I mean, we wouldn't be anybody without the talented people that have helped us build our company and the really cool customers that have believed in us over the last 30 plus years.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Yeah, there's a cool little video that's floating around out there where Steve Jobs, when he was a kid, somehow looked up in the phone book one of the Hewlett Packard founders' phone numbers and called him up and asked him some questions. And I think his point with that video was just basically, we've told our kids this since they were little, if you don't ask, you don't get. So...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Yeah, I can think of several. When I was in junior high, I was hanging out with my friends.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I've always been pretty good about if I want help with something or need help, just asking whomever I could. And so that's worked out fairly well. And we try to now pay that forward when somebody reaches out to us, so if we can help them. So it's cool.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Back in the 90s and into the 2000s, the magazines were the big thing, but obviously then you had the internet come along, a lot of car chat boards about all kinds of car subjects, and that was kind of a thing. And I think YouTube maybe came along 2006, 2007, something like that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
few streets away from home i knew i was supposed to be home at a certain time i kind of blew it off and then my dad had another muscle car i think this is a 1968 pontiac gto he comes flying down the street he rolls down the window and i'm over talking to my buddies he's like hey you're supposed to be home i'm like okay okay i'm coming so i could come to go get in the car
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
There were a couple of other different automotive video websites and we tried them all, but we started our YouTube channel pretty much within a year or two when YouTube began. And to your point, we had 1,000 plus horsepower Dodge Vipers back in those days, the Venom 1000. And so, yeah, they still get millions of views.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And so what a great platform because something I learned early on in our business, maybe we were just early modifying Vipers. There was an article that came out in Car and Driver magazine saying, An older gentleman, I think who lived around Atlanta, had read about it, called me up and said, hey, I read this article. I'm coming through Houston.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
If I came by your office, can I meet you or go for a ride in one of your cars? I said, sure. So he came by, took him for a ride in the car. He was, I think, very surprised on how fast it was. And when he got back to my office, when his hand stopped shaking, he pulled out his checkbook. He wrote me a check for 10 grand or something, a deposit for modifying his car.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
At which point I thought, okay, this is my absolute perfect closing tool. All I have to do is just give somebody that's a potential buyer that's qualified. If they get a ride in the car, as long as it doesn't scare them too bad, they're going to want to buy it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And I would tell people, don't come over here and don't come for a ride with me unless you're prepared to ride a truck because you're going to be addicted and you're going to want to feel that, right? And so with video, with YouTube, now that was like, okay, here's a way just short of... coming to Texas and going for a ride with John, here's a way where you can feel that excitement.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I have a look at our YouTube engagement of late, but we get several million views per month. And yeah, it's a great way to share with, again, whether it's a potential buyer, a potential customer, or just an enthusiast, a young person, whomever that finds our stuff interesting and cool. Obviously, YouTube has now evolved into every form of social media.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And now we're all scrolling all these little short videos that we get fed all day long, right? So yeah, however people want to consume their entertainment. I always tell people, I've been saying this for years, that our company, Hennessy, is as much in the entertainment business as we are in transportation.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
If you need transportation, you can go buy a brand new vehicle from most manufacturers for... $35,000, $40,000 that's safe, that's reliable, cold air conditioning, has all the connectivity. It will get you where you want to go. So every dollar spent over $40,000 is based upon entertainment and passion.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
People come to us, they want us to entertain them, to give them something interesting, something that's different, something that's fun. They can either enjoy themselves, share with their family and friends.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I never, ever thought of way back when. But yeah, there is definitely a status factor for whether you're buying a Mercedes, a Rolls Royce, a Ferrari, and now even Hennessy. We're a very unique American brand. And I think people, not just in America, but around the world, do identify with the American high-performance cool factor that we deliver.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And he basically just slaps into the gear and doesn't let me even open the door. And he does this big burnout, spinning the tires, making a big cloud of smoke for a couple hundred feet, at which point I knew I was in big trouble. But then again, I'm probably 12 or 13 at the time. And I look over at my buddies, they're all like,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Before the Venom F5, we built a car that was about 90% our own called the Venom GT. So if you go back to... This is almost 20 years ago. Road and Track invited us to a test where they were having a shootout. The magazine wanted to get some of the fastest cars on earth together on a runway to see which car could go from zero to 200 miles per hour in the shortest amount of time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
We brought a Venom 1000 Viper. There were several other fast cars there, Lamborghini, Mercedes SLR. The fastest car besides our car was the Bugatti Veyron. 1,000 horsepower, million dollar plus car. At the end of that contest, we beat the Bugatti by four seconds. So we're on the cover of the magazine. It's a great article. It's good for business. It's great for the brand.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
But we don't really rest on our laurels for very long. We don't celebrate for very long. We're always kind of looking at what's the next mountain to climb. And as I started to think about, I want to build a faster car, but we could keep adding horsepower, but maybe we could find something that was lighter weight. So I joke with my guys about taking a Lotus Elise, which is a tiny little car,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
and taking out the engine out of the back of that and putting our massive V10, twin turbo V10 with a thousand plus horsepower. Anyway, I came up with some renderings. I was at a trade show in Las Vegas called the SEMA show and a guy named Mike Spinelli, he was working for a website called Jalopnik at the time, put a camera in my face and he said, hey, Hennessy, what's new?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And I pulled this picture out of my backpack and I said, this is the Venom GT concept car. This is something that we're thinking of building. And so that article came out maybe a week later and maybe a week after that, some sheik from Dubai called me up and wanted to buy one. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
man that's the coolest thing we ever saw i'm like okay well maybe i can have a little bit better status with my friends in junior high by having a cool car anyway so i guess my dad by default kind of made me look cool that day so that was one again i always enjoyed just anything that was mechanical or
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
fast or the sound the excitement from cars and then had motorcycles and built my own motorcycles before i got my first car and my first car i bought with my own money i worked at a grocery store and saved up a couple hundred bucks and bought a car from my neighbor across the street which is a 1969 old 442 convertible i lived in kansas city and so i just drove that thing all over and
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Raised anybody that would race me and was always working on it in the driveway and tinkering with it. So yeah, that's kind of where it got started back in the late 1970s.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Thank you.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Yeah, sure. No, this is all pre-social media, pre-YouTube. You know, back in the olden days, you just kind of learn by doing and you just kind of learn by associating with other people that did. So in school, I'd have other buddies that like cars and would tinker with their cars and they might know something or they might know a guy that knows something. My neighbor across the street worked at a
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
That'd be fun. So, so again, it's kind of a way to pay that forward to, again, I look back to where I was at in my teens and my early to mid twenties and trying to figure it out and ran out of money for college.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And I don't know if I was really cut out for college, but you know, I think there's a lot of other people out there that are looking for a positive future, either through entrepreneurship or a passion of some kind. Hey, I have a passion for this, or I have a skillset for that. How can I monetize that? How can I do more of that?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And again, for every one thing that I've learned, I've probably had to fail 10 times as many times. So I think some of these things, some of the stuff that you're doing helps accelerate that process and helps kind of minimize some of the failure.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Every failure is an opportunity for learning. And failure is not final. I tell people all the time, you know, if you really believe in something, just never give up on it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
There's always the old catch all of leaving yourself. I go back to What sustained me through a number of tough times is just the passion for what we're doing. It started off with a passion for wanting to win a race or wanting to have some success. I would say that's really now, again, 117 employees, almost 120 employees. We have five kids. They all work in the business in some form or fashion.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Really, it's a passion for our people. It's a passion for our employees. It's a passion for the people that we interact with in the industry. It's a passion for our clients. That comes after 30 years of doing this and having 17,000 plus vehicles that we built out there. So again, I think that when everything's going great,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Ford factory up in Kansas City. He would help me with my car from time to time. But we just learn by a lot of things. There's a lot of trial and error. For every one thing that we would learn that would work, we'd have to fail many, many times. That's just how we got going.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
life is grand but when the tough times come along it's like what sustains us and i think for me ultimately what's kind of helped see us through tough times over the years is just our love for each other and our family you know my wife being kind of the backbone with the kids and really believed in me when After 9-11, we didn't sell anything for like three or four months.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
We went from having hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank to basically being running on fumes. So again, I'm sure everybody's had a tough time after 9-11. We're not any different. I'm just saying that over 34 years, when you're in business long enough, you'll have had to make it through some cycles, right? So entrepreneurs, if you're just kind of getting going out there,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
In my experience, it took us those first five to 10 years just for people to kind of know who we were, right? And then beyond that, to make it from the five to 10 years to 30 to 35 years, we've had to experience a few down markets. So just hang in there.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Enjoy the people that you're going through the journey with. And it's not about the destination. It's about the journey.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Thanks for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it. Look forward to doing it again sometime soon.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
The foundation of a brand is authenticity. You can't project your brand as something that's contrary to what you really are.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
That was the driver towards entrepreneurship. My parents didn't have much. We always had a roof over our head and food to eat. We had the basics, but that was it. So if we want to play a sport, if we want to go on a trip with friends, or if we want to do anything, we had to earn money. So I learned that at an early age. And I had a paper route at a hospital that I was doing when I was probably
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
11 or 12 years old before that i did work literally on a paper route you've heard these stories where like literally you get up at like 3 45 in the morning and it's snowing and you go get in the back of this truck which is not heated by the way and you're riding around neighborhoods rolling up newspapers and they had this machine that would tie it with a band of string and then you throw the newspaper on somebody's lawn and i remember doing that again i was probably 13 14 years old
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
We might make like $2 or $2.5, and we would do all that before school. So I guess one thing that I was really thankful for my parents, number one, that we really had no entitlement. There was no, here's your allowance. If we wanted money, we had to work for it. So we learned a solid work ethic.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
at an early age and then i've always kind of enjoyed doing my own things used to buy firecrackers down in branson missouri and resell them to my friends up in kansas city things like that or the newspaper route again i had some different jobs in high school and then when i went to college for a couple years i was a party pit guy.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
So I would show up at a frat party, sorority party, and I'm the guy taking pictures and got paid to do that kind of stuff. But then I started my own version of that. And then I moved from Kansas City to Houston when I was in my early 20s and was always just entrepreneurial. I think the last W2 paid job that I had, I worked at a Bennigan's restaurant. I waited tables for a couple months.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And at that point in time, I had a friend of mine who had a Corvette. an old 73 Corvette, which had the T-top roof panels that would come off. And I had this idea to start a business to make these soft bags that you could put the roof panels in because nobody offered that at the time. And so I was trying to earn up money at that working at Bennigan's so I could start that business.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
That didn't end up working out, but I just kept trying different things. And then a few years later, some guy that I'd met said, well, hey, there's this new businesses back in the 80s where
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
commercial real estate and schools and hospitals used a lot of asbestos for insulation on pipes and in different construction materials because of the fire retardant properties, but they were also a carcinogen and they would cause cancer. So that was kind of a new industry back then of removing asbestos from commercial buildings.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And so I went to some schooling, learned about that, started a business. Went and did that and actually had some success from that. And so I wasn't married yet. I wasn't dating my wife yet. So I had a little bit extra money and decided to start buying some cars and tinkering with the cars and decided to dabble in the car racing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
I was always motivated. Again, they were very matter-of-fact about it. They're like, well, we don't have money for that. If you want to go to McDonald's, we don't have money for that. Okay, you've got shoes, but if you want those nicer shoes, You're going to have to figure out how to make some money. Yeah. And at the time, my dad had an issue with PTSD from the Korean War.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
My parents didn't have much. That was the driver towards entrepreneurship. I kind of had to find a way to make money. There wasn't really any choice around that. I'm a little bit of a Warren Buffett when it comes to horsepower. I look for value. I look for undervalued vehicles where there's more potential that can be extracted.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
So he had an addiction issue and he wasn't working a lot of the time. My mom had to really work to support the family. So I'm like, I got to kind of at least do my part. At least, you know, if I want to have a car or a motorcycle or go and do stuff with my friends, I kind of had to find a way to make money. There wasn't really any choice around that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Yeah. Yeah. My mom passed away recently and her funeral was last week. And it was definitely a gift that I got from both of them. And when I had my newspaper route at the hospital up in Kansas City, they would generally give me a ride there. They would get up early to get me there so I could go pass out newspapers and make a little bit of money. They were supportive and encouraging.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And, you know, I got that early on. And that was truly a gift that 50 years later that still I've hopefully paid that forward into our kids.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Whatever I thought I knew about cars, again, it came from my little community of car friends. But at an early age, I don't even remember how young I was, but I was probably 8, 9, or 10 years old. I would go with my mom to the grocery store. I didn't have any interest in shopping, but I would go over to the magazine rack and read car magazines.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Couldn't afford to buy any, but I could, for the 30 minutes that she was shopping, I would just pull up Motor Trend, Hot Rod Magazine, and so would read about these things and read about racers and Indy 500 and drag racing and things of that nature. So something that I always had an interest in.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And then fast forward to in my mid-20s when I had my asbestos abatement business, and I read about a guy. His name was C. Van Toon, and he was an automotive journalist, but also a big car guy. And he bought a Mitsubishi Eclipse. Actually, it was an Eagle Talon, which was back in the early 1990s. It was an all-wheel drive, turbocharged, four-cylinder, little sports car.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And he put a roll cage in it, and he took it to Pikes Peak, and he raced it up the top of Pikes Peak back when that was a dirt road. And I'd read about that in 1990, and I thought, well, man, my name's not...
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
answer or foit and i'm not going to be or and ready and i'm not going to be going to the indy 500 but i want to find some sort of form of racing that i can do and i thought well maybe i could go find a car and modify it and take it to pike's peak that was the inspiration so i was looking around at the marketplace i'm like what's the car that i could afford that i could modify that would be cool and fun that i could race at pike's peak
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Back in the late 80s, early 90s, my dream car at that time, Porsche made a very special car, and they're very, very valuable today, called the Porsche 959. It was a 911 that was all-wheel drive. It had 450 horsepower, twin-turbo, six-cylinder engine, very high-tech car for the time. And at that time, those cars were hundreds of thousands of dollars. You couldn't get them in the U.S.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And so I thought, what car could I find and modify that I could make into my own poor man's version of a 959? And I read, again, a Motor Trend about a car called the Mitsubishi 3000 GT VR4. So it has all-wheel drive. It has a twin-turbo V6. It has active aero. So the rear wing and the front splitter would change aerodynamically to improve performance.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
that was a car that i ended up buying from a local dealer here in houston for maybe 32 000 so maybe it's 60 000 in today's money and so i could afford it and i had a plan to modify it and so the moment i got and i'm tinkering with it and i don't need more horsepower to go to pike's peak but i do need a roll cage and certain safety things but there's certain aspects about the car
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
where I felt like it had more performance potential. So I guess maybe in a way in my automotive career, I'm a little bit of a Warren Buffett when it comes to horsepower. I look for value. I look for undervalued vehicles where there's more potential that can be extracted from that vehicle. And so I was able to do that with the 3000 GT and modified it from 300 horsepower to
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
probably somewhere between four and 450 horsepower. And before I went to Pikes Peak, I'd read about, again, in another car magazine, there was a race that some guys had started in Nevada up north of Las Vegas called the Silver State Classic Race. So they would take a 90 mile stretch of highway
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
between two small towns about four hours north of vegas the state would allow them to close that road and have a race where you basically just show up in your car and you go from point a to point b as fast as you can back then they didn't have very many rules they've got a lot more rules now so i read about that race i thought okay i want to go do that so i modified my car this is a few months before pike's peak i didn't have a roll cage in my car yet i drive the car out there like you said load my stuff in it go out there
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
and competed in the race. I wasn't sure how fast the car would go or how fast I would drive the car. Actually, some old timers that have done the race several times told me, they said, don't enter a class faster than 140 miles an hour. And I thought, well, I think the car will go faster than that. I think I'll drive it faster than that. But I listened to these guys.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And so I entered the 140 class and went out and just was having a good time and ended up passing like 20 cars. I got fourth place overall. I think I went across the finish line at 180 miles an hour or something like that. And my average speed for the 90 miles was 164 miles per hour. So it took me 34 minutes to go 90 miles. And so at that point, for sure, I was hooked slash addicted to... racing.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And so I did that race. Then I did Pikes Peak. And these days, I don't have a budget for a crew. I don't have a budget for, I didn't even know I needed a crew. I didn't even know I needed a truck or a trailer. And I would show up to Pikes Peak and here are major like IndyCar type teams, like NASCAR type teams with major crews.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And I'm just this guy over here pulling my wheels and tires out the back. And and luggage and whatnot. Actually, I went and picked my wife up from the airport in Colorado Springs for the race. Anyway, I didn't win anything at Pikes Peak, but I competed, I finished. She and I went to Aspen for a little vacation afterwards. We were engaged at the time.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
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Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And then I also thought, well, now that I've got a roll cage in my car, I thought I wondered if there was a class that I could compete at at the Bonneville Slot Flats where they would do the top speed stuff. And so I got a copy of the rule book. I found a class that I fit in. And so in August, so that same year, this is 1991. So I do the Nevada Open Road Challenge in May.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
Then I did Pikes Peak in July. Then I went to Bonneville in July. August. And I set a two-way average there of 177 miles an hour, which in today's terms doesn't sound very fast. But doing that at Bonneville, it's very difficult. So I set a record there, drove it there, drove it home. And then they do another open road race in September. That's called the Silver State.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Breaking Limits: How John Hennessey Turned a Dream into the World’s Fastest Cars
And then I got second place overall in that race. And my average speed was 167 miles an hour so i went a little bit faster so anyway i do all these races and at the time i'm not doing my asbestos abatement business as much i'm engaged we're in love we're having fun we get married go on the honeymoon