Month: November 2024

For John Hennessey, the moment he realized the esoteric power of torque was a seminal one. He does suggest his connection with petroleum-firing cylinders dates prenatal, when he swears remembering driving around Houston in his dad’s stick-shift 1964 GTO 389—while still in his mom’s womb. But the first time Hennessey credits being consciously smacked in the head with that indelible power was when, as a seventh grader, he’d ignored his mother’s orders to be home by curfew. 

“I knew I was supposed to be home for something, but I was blowing it off,” Hennessey recalls, chuckling at the memory. “By then my dad had a ’68 Pontiac GTO and he comes ripping down the street, rolls down his window, and says, ‘You’re supposed to be home. Get your ass back there!’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ So I go walk to get in the car, but he’s slams it into gear and does about a 200-foot burnout because he’s pissed off, and basically he’s telling me that I had to walk home. I looked at my friends and they look at me, and all of a sudden my social status with my junior high friends went up because now I’ve got this cool dad who does burnouts,” he laughs. “I thought, ‘Okay, well, maybe if I get some social status with my friends, maybe they’ll give me some status with the ladies.’ ”

When he finally bought his first car, a 1969 Oldsmobile 442 convertible, on day one Hennessey started modifying the carburetor, spark plug wires and exhaust. The speed bug bit. 

By college, his parents had divorced. Running out of money paying his own way through an engineering degree, Hennessey took what he now jokingly dubs “a 40-year gap year.” While nursing his entrepreneurial spirit with a successful asbestos-removal business, in 1991 he funneled the profits into a blood red Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 and started cranking away on the famed 3.0-liter V6, steadily increasing output from 320 to more than 500 horses.

Inspired by a magazine feature on Pikes Peak, he drove the roll cage–enhanced 3000GT to Colorado and ran the famed sprint. And while Hennessey didn’t place, he also didn’t crash. But it was too late, the speed bug multiplied through his bloodstream, inspiring him to follow up quickly with two Nevada races: the Silver State Classic and Nevada Open Road Challenge. The only commandment for the latter, a closed-off 90-mile stretch of highway north of Vegas, was all gas, no brakes. By his second attempt Hennessey averaged 167 mph, capturing the unlimited class and second place overall. In the interim, he also set a class record at Bonneville. The virus now took full control.

“I got a little bit of a reputation of being this crazy guy from Texas who loads up his tools, helmet, spare wheels and tires, etcetera, and just sticks them in the back of his car and shows up to races,” Hennessey remembers wistfully of his penchant for driving to and from events. After one particular long drive home, victorious and with plenty of time to indulge wild thoughts, he broke his vision to his new bride. 

“I’m like, ‘I don’t know if this car thing will work or not, but I really enjoy it. I think I’m good at it, and I think there are other people out there who would pay me to modify their cars.’ ”

As with all successful endeavors, kismet too played its role. That 3000GT VR-4 mod package held more import than could ever be expected, as Hennessey transitioned much of it from the Mitsubishi to the Dodge Viper—an American muscle car so overpowered, so unhinged, so feral that it became synonymous with absurd rear-wheeled hedonism at the turn of the century. Bolting on a couple turbochargers to the 8.5-liter V10, among other upgrades, the nascent Hennessey Performance boosted output to make the Venom 1000 Viper one of the most powerful cars of the era. The rest, as they say, is Texas hooligan history, as the small Houston shop exploded with the success of his infamous Venom 1000 Viper. 

To be clear, it usually wasn’t Hennessey himself smeared in grease wrenching away under a lift, tweaking air filters and adding superchargers to maximize output. Rather, here’s where John Hennessey applied his first Fundamental Rule of Success: Know thyself. 

“I’ve always been creative, always good at marketing and sales,” he says. “But what I learned early on when I started racing is that I knew what I wanted the car to do and had a general idea of how I wanted to get it there, but I’ve always felt like there’s more talented mechanics. I’ve probably been able to get where I wanted to go quicker by partnering with or hiring people that have those very specific high-level talented skills to help me achieve my vision.”

The formula worked, and in the coming years the Hennessey Performance Venom 1000 Viper adorned the covers of evermore gushing petrol-head magazines, winning countless shootouts. Soon segueing from print to the digital age, it became a star of the Internet, YouTube and now social media. The company expanded from Vipers to Corvettes, Camaros and Mustangs, and eventually trucks, pickups and mammoth SUVs. A victim of its own success, Hennessey Performance couldn’t keep up with demand. 

The next step perhaps best crystallizes Hennessey’s entrepreneurial gift, as when challenged with a lack of engineers capable of elevating his firm to the next level, did he complain or fret? No. See John Hennessey’s second Fundamental Rule of Success: If a solution doesn’t exist, build one. 

Ergo, if capable engineers don’t exist, why not create them himself? So in 2009 Hennessey opened up his own Tuner School, where every year he trains about a hundred students from all over the world. Beyond earning him handsome tuition checks, perhaps more importantly the training ground created a direct pipeline where he plucks the very best to join the growing Hennessey empire. To date, Hennessey estimates more than half of his technical staff have come directly in-house from Tuner School.

On one particularly impactful Road and Track shootout in 2007, the company’s “Fly Navy” Venom 1000 Twin Turbo Viper accomplished the seemingly impossible, besting the Bugatti Veyron—along with a rogue’s gallery of factory supercars, exotics and modified cars—by clocking a 210.2-mph top speed. This David and Goliath feat, defeating a seven-figure hypercar from one of the industry’s most historic racing marques, earned Hennessey ever more fame. “After that shootout I thought, ‘Okay, that’s great for business. But where do we go from here?’ We’re always looking for the next mountain to climb. I thought, well, gosh, we could just keep adding horsepower, but maybe there’s a way we could go with something lighter weight? And I joked with a friend of mine, ‘Why don’t we take a Lotus Elise, swap out that little four-cylinder and put our twin-turbo Viper engine in the back of it?’ ” 

From that seemingly innocuous joke was born not just the Venom GT but an entirely new arm of the Hennessey octopus that would focus on designing and building its own cars fully in-house: Hennessey Special Vehicles. When headed to the SEMA show that year Hennessey tucked some renderings of this unnamed prototype into his backpack, on a whim as he put it, and showed them to veteran journalist Mike Spinelli. A couple days after returning from Vegas Spinelli published them on Jalopnik, and the buzz was so loud it shook the concept from fanciful rendering to potential reality. Suddenly, finally, Hennessey knew his next step. 

The first Hennessey Venom GT saw the light of day in 2010. By 2014 the Venom GT ran 270 miles an hour on a stretch of the Kennedy Space Center, besting the Bugatti Veyron’s top speed record and earning Hennessey Special Vehicles the record for the world’s fastest production car. 

Imagine: Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche and Ferrari boast nearly infinite budgets, coffers overflowing with capital, cutting-edge technology and world-class engineers. And here’s this tiny outfit—essentially a mod shop out of Texas—designing, engineering and building a vehicle capable of conquering them all. 

“I was probably more relieved than I was elated,” Hennessey shares when asked about the pride he felt at such a Herculean, truly tectonic accomplishment. “I’ve always told my kids that I hate losing more than I like winning. Now, in the past five years, maybe the joy that I get from winning—because I went to this therapy thing for some childhood trauma crap a long time ago—maybe now I can tap into feeling joy a little bit more than I used to feel.”

To wit, John Hennessey’s third and final Fundamental Rule of Success: Hate losing. A lot.

At last count, Hennessey estimates the company has modified some 16,000 vehicles in the past 33 years, selling 13 Venom GTs before sunsetting the model in 2015. And despite the accomplishment, something always stuck in his indefatigable craw: Internet haters who would comment that all Hennessey accomplished was an engine swap, nothing more. Clearly frustrated, he lists the parts carried over from the Elise (chassis, head- and tail-lights, windscreen and parts of the dash) but states “basically 90 percent of the Venom GT was our own car.”

Realizing he’d erred by not changing the exterior Lotus styling enough, his team drew up designs for a successor with utterly redesigned sheet metal. Hennessey sent the plans to longtime buyer and supporter Phil Schiller, a former Apple senior vice president, asking for his thoughts. 

“So Phil responds: ‘John, you’re just not going to get credit for having your own design till you engineer your own car.’ And that’s the point that spoke truth to me. It was painful to hear at the time, but I’m like, ‘He’s exactly right.’ ” 

Schiller’s response, although a gut punch, precisely exposed what Hennessey needed to hear to cement the fact that no matter how valiantly he jousted with Internet trolls and YouTube commenters, there would be only one way to shut them up for good. But building a car from the ground up requires a lot of money—and the world’s best minds. So he galvanized support from partners Shell and Pennzoil, whom he calls “more than sponsors,” and they funded an exterior design and build for a full-scale 1:1 model of what they called the Venom F5. Once again Hennessey chose SEMA to debut his new creation, bringing the concept to Vegas in 2017. That was enough to drum up six orders, sufficient to justify the engineering cost for Hennessey Special Vehicles to shift into the next gear. 

“I needed that boost of confidence after the success of the Venom GT to tell me that, ‘Okay, we’ve got what it takes to build our own car.’ And then as that momentum continued to build, it’s been cool because now we’ve attracted some high-level talent for the Venom F5.” On that note Hennessey proudly namechecks guys like Brian Jones, Hennessey VP of Engineering, who at his previous position at Multimatic was the chief engineer on tentpole hypercar unicorns like the Mercedes-AMG ONE, Aston Martin Valkyrie and Ford GT. 

“I replied back to that e-mail Phil sent me with pictures of the F5 and said, ‘Hey, look what your e-mail in 2013 led to.’ And he ordered a car a week later,” adds Hennessey, noting the important role the Apple exec had on his company. “The Venom F5 wouldn’t exist today if it were not for some of our customers believing in me, believing in the brand, believing in the product, believing that we could do it. Because look, I get people asking all the time, ‘What was the biggest challenge in building the Venom F5?’ And my answer is always, ‘It was getting people to believe.’ ” 

Not just suppliers, sponsors and employees to believe, mind you, but even his wife and children. This is no small order when one divulges that he’s aiming to engineer a hypercar from the ground up designed around a hand-built 6.6-liter V8 so explosive that Hennessey purposefully dubbed it “Fury”—after the “War Daddy” M4 Sherman tank that reportedly destroyed more than 250 German vehicles during World War II. But this hard-earned belief has been rewarded. Sizzling with 1,193 pound-feet of torque and a hellfire stable of 1,817 horses, the Venom F5 in its latest Revolution Coupe mode recently captured the track record at the Circuit of the Americas—besting the one-time record holder McLaren P1’s run by almost seven seconds, and the previous Czinger 21C by 0.43 seconds. To date Hennessey Special Vehicles have delivered more than 20 Venom F5’s to itchy-trigger-fingered buyers, with 30 to be finished by year’s end. In total almost 50 units have been sold. Still, the brand’s ultimate goal eludes the stubborn Texan. 

“We told the world we’re going to build the world’s fastest car, so are we going to do that?” Hennessey asks the sky, or perhaps himself. “We still haven’t forgotten about that goal. Matter of fact, I’ve got a whole army of engineers doing aerodynamic testing on a runway today, and we’re still intent on beating Bugatti. Yeah, it’s risky going out and breaking top speed records and testing cars at super high speeds, but it’s part of our DNA, part of who we are and what we do.”

The American Underdog once again bringing the good fight straight to the doorsteps of Europe. This small tuning shop from Houston, boasting barely 100 employees, taking on giants with seemingly endless resources at their disposal. Despite this colossal imbalance, Hennessey reveals at the moment the biggest obstacle to reaching the goal of world’s fastest is not necessarily engineering or funding—it’s simply finding a road in America long enough to allow him to reach speed safely. But fans of the dark horse, don’t sweat too much. It’s probably not smart to bet against him.

“The F5’s gone 272-mph in testing, but we’re just in third or fourth place. That’s okay. That’s good motivation for us,” Hennessey says. “But we don’t want to just leap frog these guys by a little bit; we want to leap frog them by a lot. I’m not going to throw a number at you, but we’re trying to go out and go faster—as much faster as we can.” 

Follow Deputy Editor Nicolas Stecher on Instagram at @nickstecher 

Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has blazed an unlikely trail to Capitol Hill. A decade ago, she appeared as a Maxim model driving a cherry-red Chevy Nova SS. Now, at 35, she’s not only the youngest Republican in the House and the first Mexican-American representative from Florida, but she’s back in Maxim, proving that power and glamour are not mutually exclusive.

In our interview, Luna, who represents Florida’s 13th congressional district, opens up about her path from a challenging childhood to the corridors of government. She also reveals, for the first time, details about her difficult upbringing. The Congresswoman talks candidly about her military service and her unexpected foray into politics.

How would you describe your childhood?

I didn’t come from a political pedigree, money or attend an Ivy League college. My father struggled with substance abuse. He was in and out of jail until later in my teens and, at one point, became homeless. He got clean when I was a young adult, and we were able to catch up on all the time we missed. Sadly, he passed away before he could see me become a member of Congress.

My mom had me at 20. Her family had also been heavily impacted by drugs. She eventually ended up getting married, but it was an extremely abusive relationship. At one point, we tried to go to a women’s shelter with my little sister and brother, but the conditions were so unsafe that she had to bring us back home.

This is the first time I’ve ever publicly spoken about this. Seeing what my family went through, particularly my mom, instilled a deep desire to stand up for those being hurt and to do the right thing. My parents may not have been perfect, but I did learn from their strengths and mistakes, and I’m extremely proud of them both.

The American dream is alive and well, and I’m living proof. I tell people that you may not be able to control the circumstances in which you are born, but you can control the outcome. I had to grow up fast, but I never stopped fighting. Because of hard work and perseverance, I’m now a member of Congress.

At what point did you decide you wanted to join the military?

I went to several high schools, including one where a gang shooting occurred. I always wanted to go to college but had no idea how I was going to pay for it. One night, I went out with some friends and overheard a few guys talking about how the Marines were paying for their education. I ended up jumping into the conversation and enlisting in the Air Force. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

What were some of the lessons you took from the military?

First, the concept of “total and complete ownership.” The mission always comes first, and the commanding officer is entirely responsible for the mission’s success and failure. I also learned direct communication and delegation of authority. I run my office very similarly to how a base is run—top-down delegation of authority. However, I would never ask my staff or “troops” to do something I wouldn’t do alongside them. We’re a team, and there must be team cohesion to have a successful unit and, in my case, a congressional office. Lastly, I learned to never quit. I wasn’t successful during my first campaign; however, I didn’t give up. When I was elected this cycle and flipped a seat, it was all because I never quit. Failure is never an option.

What led you to become a Maxim model?

At the time, there was this idea that women in the military couldn’t be feminine. I wanted to help shatter the narrative and decided to join the Maxim model competition [in 2014]. I had also received permission to do it from the public affairs office at the Pentagon, so it seemed like the military also wanted help breaking the stereotype. I ended up getting into the magazine and still have that issue to this day!

What ultimately drove you to politics and public service?

In 2018, I got out of the military. I was on track to go to medical school, and during my gap year, I started volunteering for an organization that counters child sex trafficking. I quickly realized that there was a direct correlation between an open Southern border and increased cases of child trafficking. At that point, I became politically active as I realized that many people were uninformed about what was happening. I realized that to change the national narrative and to try to solve the issue, I would have to run for office. There’s not exactly a manual on how to do that, but I figured it out. This job is not easy, but it’s extremely rewarding. I know that I’m already having an impact on foreign policy and our military and raising awareness to stop crimes against children.

Most people play it safe, but you’re not afraid to tread where others fear. Why do you think there are so few politicians like you?

On both sides, there are politicians who are content with being elected and not making waves because they want to maintain their position in office and make reelection easier. Those people are why we’re currently facing some of the problems we have, whether it’s regarding foreign policy, the national debt or a decline in military recruitment.

I knocked on 50,000 doors and made more than 90,000 phone calls during my first election. Almost everyone I spoke to had lost faith in politicians, and I kept hearing: “Please don’t become a part of the problem,” or “I trust you to do the right thing.” So I promised myself and my constituents when I got elected that I would represent them and fulfill my campaign promises.

I realize that it comes with a price, though. When I first got elected, there was a well-known left-leaning outlet that tried to smear me. They even went so far as printing lies that they later had to retract. However, the silver lining in all of it was that after this political hit piece, Time magazine did a deep dive into my bio and found out I was telling the truth. They then named me to the TIME100 “Next” list as one of the most influential leaders in the world.

What has surprised you most about the world of politics?

How quickly things leak to the press! I remember when I first got elected, we were in a closed-door session to talk about the election of the next Speaker of the House, and no press was allowed. After the meeting, I headed back to my office, and before I could even let my chief of staff know what had happened, he asked me about a conversation in the meeting. I later found out that someone was leaking information to the press. News travels at lightning speed in Washington, and the press is everywhere.

There’s so much bias and propaganda masquerading as news. What do you think has led us to this?

It seemed like during the Obama years, the media began to be openly involved in propaganda. This largely increased when Donald Trump decided to run for president in 2015. The mask of the legacy media was removed and exposed for what it really was. Then, social media started to push out legacy media. With censorship isolating viewpoints and preventing dialogue, I believe this led to polarization. I know certain platforms were censoring because I investigated them and saw clear evidence as a congressional investigator on House Oversight. However, being a public figure and elected official makes it hard to combat slander and defamation as we don’t have the same protections as a private citizen would.

Donald Trump is the most successful political entrepreneur of our generation. What are some things you’ve learned from him?

I’ve known President Trump for four years. There are four things I’ve learned from him: First, always do what you think is right for the people you serve, even if it means going against the grain and sometimes your own party. The Washington, D.C. elite is real, and when it comes to fixing a broken system, being an outsider is not a bad thing.

Second, the best deal comes at the eleventh hour. I’ve learned a lot from listening to him talk about interactions with foreign leaders and dealing with brokering trade deals. Honestly, he’s made me a better negotiator.

Next, stay focused. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Have a clear head.

Finally, don’t forget the personal touch. Behind closed doors, he’s the most hospitable and caring person I’ve ever met. His family adores him, and so does his staff. He has personal friendships with many members of Congress and the Senate and does little things to stay in touch, such as writing letters and making calls.

What’s your favorite car and why?

The INEOS Grenadier! I’ve always been into exploring the outdoors and used to own a Jeep. The make of their 4×4 is impressive A majority of the vehicle is analog. It’s like being in a jetliner with the interface.

What’s your favorite firearm?

I currently own and carry a 9mm SIG Sauer P365. Of all the firearms I’ve shot and practiced on, this is the most user-friendly and reliable. I had someone break into my home when I was stationed in Missouri, and it wasn’t until I got my concealed carry permit that I felt safe again. I carry it every day.

Who’s a better shot, you or your husband, Andrew?

I’m actually a pretty good shot, but in all honesty, he’s better. Andrew was a U.S. Air Force combat controller and went to sniper school. Combat controllers are some of the most highly trained military special operators in the Department of Defense, so he has had a bit more range time. [Laughs]

What music do you like to listen to?

I’m a big fan of Led Zeppelin. “When the Levee Breaks” is one of my favorite songs, but my Spotify playlist includes everything from Max Richter to J. Cole to Artemas.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would it be?

The historical archives at the Vatican.

Will you let Maxim be the first to know when you run for president of the United States?

Of course…if I do. But right now, I’m focused on representing the amazing people of Pinellas County and Florida’s 13th congressional district.

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This article appears in our November/December 2024 issue. Click here to subscribe to Maxim magazine.