Hennessey Performance President John Hennessey recently spoke to Aftermarket Business about his company's Tuner School, a 14-week course that teaches and trains future performance vehicle tuners.
AMB: Where did the idea of opening your own Tuner School come from?
JH: For the last 18 years we've operated Henessey Performance Engineering which is a company that specializes in taking fast cars and modifying them and making them faster. In the course of doing that, we've been written up in a lot of car magazines around the world. When those articles come out, we get emails and phone calls from young guys asking us where they can go to learn how to modify cars. I've gotten those calls for years. We've put links on our web site to refer them to McPherson College where they can go learn about auto restoration, or other technical schools like UTI or Wyotech. Clemson has a motorsports engineering program, but that's a hard program to get into.
So these guys are asking us where they can go learn to modify cars, and there wasn't anywhere else I knew of where they could go to learn how to modify cars for higher performance like we do. And so as our business has grown over the years, I thought if we started our own program, met that need, gave young guys the fundamental skills, the skills we'd be looking for an as employer looking to hire an entry-level technical to the shop, we'd train these young guys with the same skills, it would give these guys the ability to break into the market.
I thought from the standpoint of meeting the need of the marketplace and one of the challenges for us has been finding skilled labor to get things done the way we like them done. We might end up hiring a third of the guys who come through our program. We've had 25 come through the program and we've hired 8 or 10 of them.
AMB: Tell us a bit about how the program works, how the students learn.
JH: We really want our program to have as much hands-on experience as possible, so our guys they get to work on a couple of different vehicles in the tuner school. They get to do the before and after testing on the dyno. So before they modify a car, they'll baseline on the dyno to see what the power level is, and then they'll modify it and they can see the before and after. We'll do the same thing on the drag strip. We have our own quarter-mile dragstrip right next to our workshop and our classroom. So they go over there and baseline the car, run it down the dragstrip, modify it and notice the differences. The drag strip is something that really makes us unique. At our facility, they are out on the racetrack every week. We consider the race track a part of the classroom.
AMB: What do your students get out of their experience at Tuner School?
JH: Whether they plan on being a high-performance tech or a performance shop owner or whether they do this for a period of time and then go back to school and become a doctor, lawyer or something else, the skills and knowledge and experience they get at Tuner School they will be able apply that to their automotive passion and hobby for the rest of their lives. It's something they'll always have.
Some of the guys who came here have gone on to work for us, some have gone to other shops, some have gone on to work for race teams, some have gone back to school. A few students came here on a break from college and then went back. One student came here who had just finished up his degree in accounting. The universal thing about these guys is that they have a passion for automotive performance. Some guys might be into Hondas, some into race cars, some are into muscle cars. They show up at 8:30 in the morning, usually them come early and they stay late. They do it because they want to be there, not because they have to.
One of the guys here is probably in his late 40s, owned his own business and retired early. He brought his own race rig and trailer and two of his performance cars here, a modified Jeep and a modified Camaro, and he's learning how to tweak and modify his own vehicles while he's here. There's a lot of different stories, a lot of different folks who come through the program.
AMB: Why do you think there is such an interest in automotive performance education?
JH: Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the only way you could learn to modify cars and do performance work was to hang around other guys that did that kind of stuff. So it was your dad, your neighbor, the guy down the street. You picked up bits and pieces from all over. What we've tried to do with our 14-week program is really boil down fundamentals from shop safety to tool selection to the fundamental things that make horsepower, whether its nitrous, superchargers, turbochargers, headers, exhaust, and boil it all down to where guys can get experience and get exposed to different things. Guys come into the program and work on different vehicles. Right now Hyundai has given us a Genesis Coupe so we've got that. We've got one of the new 2010 Chevrolet Camaros that the guys are working on. And the Tuner School is adjacent to the Hennessey Performance Shop, and at any time, they are working on 30-35 cars. So they get exposed to a variety of different cars, and drag racing, road racing and dyno testing. While they are with us they are able to find out if they like certain aspects of the business, whether it's fabrication or computer tuning or working on cars. One of our last tuner school classes, one of the kids we hired had a real skill in connecting with people, so we hired him as a salesman. While they are at school, we can observe them and see what talents they have and see if they are a good mechanic, or fabricator, and they can pursue what they want to pursue. And typically when people pursue what they enjoy, they excel at it. We try to give them some guidance along the way. And then we can use our resources, our connection to try to help them get their foot in the door.
