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Corvette Hall Of Famer John Heinricy On His Lifelong Love Affair

John Heinricy has held some very front-and-center engineering positions with General Motors in the past. He’s retired now, but his career has had an illustrious span, including stints as Assistant Chief Engineer for the Corvette program, and Director of the GM Performance Division.

On a more personal note, he is also a rabid Corvette enthusiast, and has been since the tender age of 8.

He recently recounted his lifelong love affair with the Corvette on a GM blog, riding his bike every Sunday from the family farm to a nearby town, to watch a group of local motorists drag race. One car – a 1961 Chevrolet Corvette – stood out from the rest to Mr. Heinricy.

Over a decade later, Heinricy started as an Engineer at the GM Warren Tech Center, and in 1978, purchased a then-new silver Corvette Anniversary Coupe. It was the first of 15 that the engineer would eventually come to own.

“Both in and out of the office, my life revolved around the Corvette. If I wasn’t working on its development in the office, I was racing for fellow Corvette enthusiasts like Dick Guldstrand and Tommy Morrison. I was given the nickname ‘Heinrocket’ almost thirty years ago and it has stuck with me throughout my racing career.”

Although he is now retired from General Motors, John Heinricy still races Corvettes every chance he gets – and indeed, he’s had an illustrious career doing so. He’s won 6 SCCA national championships in a Corvette, and had a hand in the Corvette racing program that won 19 consecutive races from ’85 to ’87.

So, Mr. Heinricy, our hats are off to you. When you do what you love, you never work a day in your life.

Aaron Brzozowski is a writer and motoring enthusiast from Detroit with an affinity for '80s German steel. He is not active on the Twitter these days, but you may send him a courier pigeon.

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Comments

  1. “I was given the nickname ‘Heinrocket’ almost thirty years ago and it has stuck with me throughout my racing career.”

    The nickname even followed me into my adult film acting career. I wanted the name ‘Heiny’, but the producer said ‘Heinrocket’ had better marketability.

    Reply
  2. John should be given credit for turning GM suspension tuning around.

    His legacy is that he took the GM Performance Division and took cars that were ok and turned many into world class handling cars. After that the division was broken up and the people that worked for him were integrated into programs from the start so not only did the performance version handle better but even the standard versions were right from the start.

    Just for example look a the Cobalt SS Turbo. His group took a car that was a messy little commuter box and made it into a car that would lap the Ring in Germany with in 3 seconds of a Camaro SS. Also they made the car handle and not make your kidneys bleed from over springing the car or just trying to slap tires on it. They often took a less is more approach and used softer springs and better shocks with better geometry. This is the smart way to set up a car and it shows.

    I own one of the products he worked on and tested and I love it. It makes driving to work a pleasure and I even take the longer winding lake roads to enjoy it and seek out that perfect line. The tuning of the car make it feel like it is slow till you see you are 30 MPH faster than you thought. That is a sign of a well tuned platform. When it is right it feel like you are much slower than you really are.

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  3. John– Wondering I sold a 2014 Corvett 3LT to a Gentleman who had a problem with the Flywhee and boots were making noise—-The mechanics said they did not know whaqt the problem waqs they just replaced the bolts and flywheel.
    They said the bolts had chaffing on the opposite sides and he now does not trust the car to drive and wants to return it.
    Hopefully you have heard of this problem, and can tell me if there are other corvets had this problem and if there was a fix or exactly what the problem was, The customer said if you just replaced parts without knowing what was wrong it might happen again and he does not trust the car now. H E L P ME

    Reply

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