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 Cita-tion, 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 exotic equipment, 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 nota-bly, 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 teammates 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 Ford's 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.