- 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) Smash that subscribe button. Smash it. Smash it. Smash
the subscribe button. Subscribe to Donut. Subscribe
to Donut. Subscribe. 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? Hey y'all, if you're like me, you've got secrets, lots of em. And if you don't want just anybody or any company watching what you do on your computer, there's
a simple solution. ExpressVPN. It gives you anonymity, privacy, security, and you can watch videos
that aren't available in your region, like anime. The best part is that it's
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to learn more. Take back your privacy today. Go to DonutMedia.com to buy
this sweet, sweet shirt. Brought to you buy
DonutMedia.com and this shirt Follow me on Instagram at @JamesPumphrey Follow Donut on Instagram at @DonutMedia Watch this episode. Watch this episode. I love you.
James is my man crush
Goes to show that hennything is possible.
Awww yeah.
Nicely Done 👍
Why does it look like they photoshopped his hair on?
The car in now yellow on the thumbnail. Wassupitdat?