The Texas Mile [1] is quickly becoming the touchstone of straight-line performance; much like a hot lap at the Nurburgring is the way car manufacturers gauge their efforts against each other, this strip of Lone Star runway has turned into the source of tuner bragging rights here in North America.
[2]With John Hennessey’s shop [3] within driving distance, it’s no surprise to find him testing his handiwork there. What might be somewhat out of the ordinary is that the handiwork happened to be his wife’s CTS-V wagon, which has been upgraded to V700 spec [4], which entails a cylinder head swap, supercharger pulley upgrade, a new cam, and a host of other breathing improvements to deliver a claimed 707 crank horsepower at 6,300 RPM.
631 horsepower to the wheels through an automatic transmission makes this family truckster faster in the standing mile than the stock Corvette ZR1 – watch closely and you’ll see in the video that the most dramatic aspect of Hennessey’s record-breaking run is how the windshield fogs up as the car passes the quarter mile mark and he has to reach over to flip on the defroster!
With a near-190-MPH trap speed on the books, Hennessey filled up with pump gas and made the 175-mile trip back home behind the wheel of the “Hammer Wagon” (though we doubt that he did the trip back in 55 minutes, 21 seconds – even in Texas, you can’t keep the loud pedal planted on public roads…)