Up till recently, it was accepted that the world’s fastest production road car was the Bugatti Veyron, but now there is a challenge thrown down by a small manufacturer/tuner in the USA called Hennessey.
In what is really a fairly pointless exercise, Texas tuning company, Hennessey, has claimed its Lotus-based Venom GT is now the world’s fastest production car after it recorded a top speed run of 427 km/h at a US Naval air base in California.
While Bugatti’s million-dollar Veyron Super Sport has officially recorded a top speed of 431 km/h – and is recognized by Guinness World Records as the fastest production car – this speed was recorded with the car’s 415 km/h electronic speed limiter removed and the car ran on a nine-kilometer straight section of Volkswagen’s high-speed test track.
Hennessey Venom GT.
Now here comes the semantics – company founder, John Hennessey, claims his Venom GT should claim the title as the Veyron Super Sport wasn’t in the specification available to customers.
“While a Veyron Super Sport did run 430.98 km/h, Bugatti speed-limits its production vehicles to 415 km/h. Thus, at 427.60km/h the Venom GT is the fastest production car available to the public,” said John Hennessey.
In addition, “While the 3.2 km long runway is more than enough acceleration distance for an F/A-18 fighter jet, it was far too short for the Venom GT to reach its true top speed,” added Hennessey Performance CEO, Don Goldman.
The Venom GT is no stranger to the world records holding the Guinness record for the quickest accelerating production car, with times such as 0-300 km/h in 13.63 seconds – around the same time it takes a high performance V8 to achieve half that speed.
The Venom GT is based on a Lotus Exige chassis fitted with a twin-turbo 7.0 liter V8 that produces in excess of 925 kW and, unlike the all-wheel drive Veyron, transmits the outrageous amount of power to the ground through only the rear wheels.
Hennessey plans to build a total of 29 of the carbon fiber Venom GTs – one less than Bugatti’s Veyron Super Sport edition – each costing a little more than $1.1 million. It claims that more than one-third have already been sold in the United States.
Hennessey’s position goes against the current trends from traditional hypercar brands, such as Ferrari, Lamborghini and McLaren, which have all admitted the Veyron’s top speed mark has become unbeatable, but also irrelevant. Hear! Hear!
But, saving the good news till last, John Hennessey claims that given the same length of wind-up for his Venom GT, it will break 445 km/hour.
