Low-key and buttoned-down, a sixty-year-old Midwesterner wearing corporate attire
and toeing the company line, Heinricy doesn’t look or act like a prophet. But appearances
to the contrary, he’s the kind of impassioned car guy who feeds on car specs and
bleeds 10W-40. Although he grew up milking cows on a farm in South Dakota, he was
driving by the time he was eight, tearing up the backyard in a ‘55 Pontiac. When
he was eleven, he took apart a Briggs & Stratton engine-“it was so rusted that I
had to soak it in diesel fuel for a couple of weeks”-and put it back together to
use in a motorized bicycle. After his mother persuaded him to aim higher than his
original goal of becoming a car mechanic, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering
and signed on at Chevrolet as a test engineer.
While working at Milford, he learned that his forte was ride and handling. On his
own, he developed a performance package for the Chevy Citation, which went on to
dominate its class in SCCA club racing. This led to a stint on the new C4 Corvette
and, later, a GM-sponsored return to school to get an MBA. This put Heinricy on the
fast track to a position as a corporate executive. But an experience providing trackside
support for a Chevy Camaro running in the twenty-four-hour enduro at Nelson Ledges
caused him to jump the rails and belatedly infected him with a serious case of the
racing jones.
Heinricy ran his first race, in a rented Citation, when he was thirty-six. Before
long, he was racing in nearly two dozen pro events per year while working full-time
at GM. Aside from testing and a handful of one-off drives in more exoticequipment,
he’s spent his entire career in production-based GM race cars, and he’s as good as
it gets in raunchy, rear-wheel-drive iron-F-body Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds and,
most notably, hairy-chested C4 and C5 Corvettes.
“It starts with his encyclopedic knowledge of the car he’s racing-every bolt size,
every thread pitch, every durometer reading,” Knowles says. “You have to beat John
in terms of car prep, which is hard. You have to beat him in terms of car setup,
which is also hard. You have to beat him in terms of driving ability, and that’s
hard, too. String it all together and you’ve got a formidable opponent. When you
beat him, it’s a very special treat.”
Although Heinricy doesn’t strut around the paddock telling everybody how great he
is, he’s convinced that he stacks up well with even the most rarefied competition.
As he puts it: ‘You quickly realize that there aren’t any gods in racing.” Over the
years, he’s held his own against team-mates such as Max Angelelli, Ron Fellows, Boris
Said, and Scott Sharp. As recently as 2005, during a guest appearance in a World
Challenge Cadillac at Mid-Ohio, he outran team drivers Max Papis and Andy Pilgrim
en route to a second-place finish.
Although Heinricy clearly had enough talent to turn pro, he started racing too late
to get a call from a premier team. Plus, he had the kind of day job that most engineers
would kill for. Two cars he keeps under wraps in his two-story garage-yep, he designed
it on a steep hill to accommodate split levels-mark the two poles of his career.
On the left is the Camaro IROC-Z he co-drove with Knowles to his first national championship
in 1989. On the right is a Corvette Grand Sport. Serial number 0001. “It’s a beauty,
isn’t it?” he says as he pulls off the cover and admires the two-tone, limited-edition
C4 he helped conceptualize.
Heinricy suspects that his career progress was slowed by his passion for racing and
Corvettes, and he’s done some time in prosaic passenger-car programs. But when GM
created HPVO in 2002 as an analog to performance divisions such as Fords SVT, Chrysler’s
SRT, and BMW’s M, Heinricy was the obvious choice to run it. While developing cars
for racing, he and his 150 employees typically work on five production cars and proposals
for five more.
“I love my job,” Heinricy says. “I really enjoy developing cars to be fast. But I
really enjoy racing, too. In fact, I enjoy it more now than I ever have. Still, it
would be hard for me to be as satisfied racing full-time as I am with what I do today,
which is a mixture of the two.”
He throws the car cover back over the Grand Sport and closes the garage door, a dream
engineer with a dream job.
