Before I talk about the Hennesey Venom GT’s “unofficial” feat, let us delve into some short history first. The quest for beating blistering speed records will never end. The madness was started by the legendary McLaren F1, a hypercar that brought blistering numbers (240.1mph) way back in ’93. More than a decade later, the envelope was pushed much further by the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, a 1001-bhp hypercar that was well advanced and insanely fast in its heyday. Since then, many hypercar manufacturers and tuners like Koenigsegg, SSC and Henessey have come up to challenge the Bug’s speed record, with some of them beating it, although it wasn’t officially recognized. Still Bugatti had to do something to maintain the Veyron’s reputation as the fastest car in the world and later outed the Bugatti Veyron Supersport. Hitting a whopping 267mph, the Veyron SS showed others who’s the boss and is currently the Guinness World record holder for the fastest production car.
But, this didn’t stop rivals from trying to take the mantle away from the Veyron again, now in its final days of production. And after long last, finally the dark, Lotus-inspired, anti-Bugatti hypercar a.k.a the Hennessey Venom GT has managed to beat the Veyron SS’ record by hitting 270.49mph at the Kennedy Space Center. This makes the Venom GT the new fastest production car to be built. Sadly however, it’s not recognized by the Guinness Committee as the car didn’t do the speed run in the opposite direction (because of the boffins at the Space Center) and for some reason, in order to qualify for the record the company has to build 30 units of the same car. Hennessey is slated to build only 29 units and have so far delivered 11 of them.
Though it’s a phenomenal feat to pull off, it still doesn’t sate the man behind the project, John Hennessey. ”Looking at the rate of acceleration, we’re still pulling around 1mph per second at 270mph,” he says. Hennessey predicts that they could’ve averaged the same speed in the opposite direction, if NASA had allowed them. “With another mile to run, I believe the car could do 275. Maybe 280…”. Since the Space Center had only 3.22 miles of runway at their disposal, it was deemed dangerous to go faster. Had they got access to the 5.5-mile Ehra-Lessien straight (Bugatti’s testing turf), the numbers could’ve gone a litter higher. But for the future, they’ll focus more on getting it to turn corners better and attack well-known tracks to validate the performance numbers. Hennessey claims that the Venom GT could be the fastest around the TopGear test track, which is a better validation than the 270mph speed record they just made (unofficially).
Nevertheless, it’s an awesome feat and we congratulate Hennessey and his team for pulling it off with the Venom GT. By the way, it still holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest 0-300kph acceleration time of 14.03 sec, crushing the previous record holder, the Agera R and the Veyron SS.
Courtesy: TopGear