It was a long time coming, and even longer for diehard supercar fans, but Hennessey's new Venom F5 is finally here. The Texas tuning house whipped the covers off its highly anticipated hypercar at SEMA in Las Vegas this week, revealing a mean-looking, carbon fiber body befitting the fastest production car in the world.
First teased in 2014 and built to succeed Hennessey's already ultra-fast, record-busting Venom GT supercar, the F5 is named after the strongest tornado rating on the Fujita scale. Twisters at this severity contain wind speeds of between 261 and 318 mph (420 to 512 km/h), and that is exactly the range where the Venom F5 should do its best work.
Its grand unveiling at SEMA was accompanied by some truly butt-clenching specs. The new twin-turbo V8 is claimed to put out more than 1,600 bhp through a seven-speed paddle shift transmission, with the drag coefficient listed as 0.33, a decent dip from the Venom GT's 0.44. A newly-designed chassis and carbon fiber body make for a curb weight of 2,950 lb (1,338 kg).
All of this, Hennessey says, will send the F5 from 0 to 300 km/h (186 mph) in less than 10 seconds, which is faster than a modern-day Formula 1 car. Zero to 249 mph (400 km/h) and back to zero again takes less than 30 seconds, and the top speed is expected to go beyond 300 mph (482 km/h), which would be a world first for a production vehicle.
"We've designed F5 to be timeless so that in 25 years it will still have a level of performance and design that will be unmatched," said John Hennessey, company founder and CEO. "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 for the most powerful tornado speed winds on the Fujita scale, to be the first road car capable of achieving more than 300 mph and have worked closely with Pennzoil to get us across the finish line."
If you're hoping to get behind the wheel of Hennessey's ludicrous hypercar, then you'll need to get your skates on. It plans to build just 24 of them, with a base price of US$1.6 million. The car will be on show at SEMA through to November 3, where New Atlas is on the ground, so stay tuned for more pictures and impressions. In the meantime, you can feast your eyes on this stupendous sample of automotive engineering in the gallery and check out the promo video below.
Source: Hennessey