A whopping 270.49mph top speed betters the current Bugatti Veyron Super Sport.
Remember when the Hennessey Venom GT knocked the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport off its perch as the world’s fastest production car, only for the Guinness World Records to hand back the record to the Bugatti after a dispute? Well now the monstrously powerful machine is back ─ and out for blood.
The 1,244bhp Hennessey Venom GT achieved an eye-wateringly fast top speed of 270.49mph at the Kennedy Space Center in the US, the Top Gear website reported. That betters the Bugatti Veyron’s original record of 269.86mph, making it the fastest production car the world has ever known.
While there’s no disputing the impressiveness of the top speed achieved by test pilot Brian Smith, arguably how it gets there is even more astonishing. The Venom, for instance, accelerated from 20mph to 120mph in 7.71 seconds and from 120mph to 220mph in less than ten seconds. Most cars struggle to hit 62mph in ten seconds.
We should point out the Venom only had NASA’s 3.22-mile runway to play with, compared with the Veyron’s 8-mile oval-shaped VW test cicruit. There’s also the fact the Venom only performed one run, whereas the Veyron did an upwind and downwind leg.
“We wanted to run in both directions, but the NASA guys wouldn’t let us. Getting into NASA isn’t easy. It was a two-year process,” Hennessey owner John Hennessey told Top Gear. “The morning was relatively calm, about a 3mph quarter-crosswind. If we’d run in both directions, the result would have been pretty much the same.”
Before you crack open the champagne in celebration, you should know Guinness requires a second run for an official record, which means the Veyron is technically still number one. For now, at least, although we can’t see VW letting Hennessey use its track for the day.
Hennessey believes the Venom GT could hit as much as 280mph with a longer stretch of tarmac. “Looking at the rate of acceleration, we’re still pulling around 1mph per second at 270mph,” Hennessey commented. “With another mile to run, I believe the car could do 275. Maybe 280…”
The Hennessey Venom GT is comprised a 7-litre twin-turbocharged V8 and base of a Lotus Exige. Check out the speed run below or use this link.
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