And a top speed that’ll “exceed 300mph.”
Hennessey Special Vehicles, a small American automotive company that takes pride in showing uppity European marques what’s what, has dropped what might just be the biggest automotive bomb in a long while, as far as road-going top-speed chasers go. The Hennessey Venom F5 is not only very yellow, but it’s also very fast. Really fast.
“We’ve designed the F5 to be timeless, so that in 25-years it will still have a level of performance and design that will be unmatched. The F5 is an all-new car, designed and built from the ground up, from the engine to the chassis. We expect the Venom F5, named after the most powerful tornado on the Fujita scale, to be the first road-car capable of achieving more than 300mph.” — John Hennessey, Founder, Hennessey Special Vehicles
Despite being named after a force of wind, the Venom F5 cuts through air very efficiently, with a drag coefficient 0.33, which works in tandem with the carbon-fibre rich construction to offer little impediment for the engine to push it towards the horizon at immense speed. The body panels you see are all carbon-fibre, while the underlying frame was engineered to be as light as possible. As such, the twin-turbo V8 sitting in the middle has little burden as it propels the car from 0-300km/h in “less than 10-seconds.”
That engine, designed and built by Hennessey themselves, puts out a staggering 1193kW from its eight cylinders, though a displacement wasn’t disclosed at the time of writing. Neither was an accurate 0-100km/h time, nor the car’s actual top speed. The 300mph/482kmh mark is something that the company is targeting (rather confidently), but is presently unverified (though we don’t expect that to take too long).
The numbers they are touting are things like that 0-300km/h time of less than 10-seconds (even that wasn’t presented in the most accurate manner), and expects to be able to do the 0-400km/h-0 test that all the top-speed chasers are doing these days in less than 30-seconds, quite a bit less than the 42-seconds touted by Bugatti and the 36.44-seconds publicised by Koeniggsegg (you can read about Bugatti’s go in the Chrion here, and the subsequent humiliation by the Koenigsegg Agera RS here).
What we know for certain is that just 24 Hennessey Venom F5’s will be built, with prices starting at US$1.6-million (or $2.1-million in our notes). And with Australian laws regarding left-hand drive vehicles permitting cars exactly like the Venom F5 to be registered and driven here, we’re hoping to see at least one of these make it to our shores (and praying its lucky owner will be generous enough to give us a ride).
Check out the gallery below for more images of the Hennessey Venom F5. And for more information on every new car currently on sale, check out our Showroom.
