[The Boss]

So in November I got contacted by someone who used to work with John Bennet at GM Chassis & had seen the car on one of the boards - here's one of the e-mails...

John Bennett was a draftman in the Chassis group at GM. He was very good and worked his way up to being a "design leader - technical" which meant he supervised and delegated work for draftsman in the chassis structure and suspension areas.

Outside GM, he built A-sedan cars and owned/managed an IMSA team which raced Firebirds. He mantra was: "If you are not cheating, you are not winning". His cars were very trick, with many hidden body reinforcements. In IMSA, he built what he called "50-50" engines, where one bank of the engine was the bore for a 305ci and the other bank was the bore of a 350ci engine. He wanted more displacement and by overboring one side of the block, he had a "50-50" chance of being caught for cheating during tech inspection, as usually only 1 cylinder head was asked to be pulled. He was sponsored by Sunoco, but liked Mobil One oil, so he would pour Mobil One oil into Sunoco bottles to maintain his sponsorship. I think his cars were purchased new and immediately turned into race cars.

Honestly, I only worked around John for 1 year, so I don't know that much about him. He was quite a character: loud, light brown hair with a Fu Manchu, always wore cowboy boots. I bet he would not remember me if you asked him. My friend Brad Bromley knew John better than I, as he worked with him for probably 8 years. Brad owns a 1982 Firebird which was a street car until around 1990, then converted into an American Sedan race car. John Bennett built the cage for it. When Brad put it into the wall at Mid-Ohio, John referred Brad to a body shop in Pontiac, Michigan where John took his cars for frame straightening and body repair. When Brad took his car in, the owner of the shop said: "if this car has John's frame rail reinforcements, I cannot straighten it!" That is how we learned about John installing tubing inside the body rails of his race cars. Brad's car did not have this modification, so it was able to be repaired. When John got out of racing, he sold many of his leftover parts to Brad (aluminum hood, radios, etc.) which Brad used to update his A-sedan Firebird. I used to crew for Brad and we are still good friends to this day (now that his kids are older, I am trying to talk him into getting his Firebird out of storage and back on the track).

That is about all I know, to be honest. John retired from GM in the early 2000s. My friend Brad has not heard from him since. I hope he is well.

About your car, my guess is it was ordered by a GM executive on John's behalf. The executive would have driven it for the required 4 months, then turn it is. John could have worked with a fleet coordinator so he could "tag" the car through the employee purchase program. In the 1990s, there was a lot of shenanigans played by GM employees who raced by ordering special edition high performance cars as their company cars. John Heinricy (another former A-Sedan racer, and my former Director) ordered several ILE Camaro and Firebird cars over the years, drove them as his company car, purchased the car at a discount then converted them into a race car. The employee purchase price would have been 80% of the MSRP: meaning Bennett probably paid $14k for this car. As a side note, I almost bought a 1998 Firebird 1LE hardtop that Heinricy ordered but decided not to buy, as he started racing for Phoenix Motorsport (based in Pittsburgh). It was Hugger Orange with manual windows & locks. I passed on it, as I was a recent college graduate and figured driving it as my only vehicle would be too much of a compromise. That car is probably 1 of 1. Just bad timing for me, as I started at GM in July 1998 and literally had a negative net worth (with college loans, etc.).

I hope this helps. Again, I don't know anything else about John Bennett. I'll ask my friend Brad if he would be willing to talk: he may have more information to share.