HOUSTON: Look out Bugatti. Texas's Hennessey Performance is getting ready to unveil its first in-house hypercar, the Venom F5, a vehicle named after the highest point on the Fujita scale for measuring tornado speeds.
The Fujita scale rates an F5 Tornado as having a wind speed between 420kph and 510kph and so it couldn't be a more apt moniker for the new car, as that's exactly the performance bracket it is promising to achieve.
"The best way I can describe the Venom F5 is that it is sophisticated aggression on wheels," said company CEO John Hennessey. "It brings forth an all-new design and chassis to achieve even higher performance through improved aerodynamics and technology."
Boutique carmakers threatening to bring the fight to Bugatti is nothing new and usually it ends in tears. "How can a small company from Texas design test build a hyper car that can compete with the best from Bugatti, Ferrari or McLaren? The simple answer is we have to be very creative," said Hennessey.
And since launching in 1991, his company has demonstrated it has blue-sky thinking in abundance. It has moved seamlessly from taking US cars and making them faster to turning its attention to upping the performance on supercars. This led to the Hennessey Venom GT, the firm's first hypercar, and one that, despite sharing a few components with a Lotus to meet crash safety regulations, was capable of hitting 435kph.
Every lesson learned from that project and every breakthrough made will be filtered into the F5, a car that will come close to doing 483kph when it's officially unveiled later this year and in doing so potentially usurp the Bugatti Chiron as the world's fastest series production vehicle.
"VW and Bugatti have got great recourses and engineers and a lot of money. And we have a lot less of that. But what we don't lack is enthusiasm, passion, and a desire to be the fastest," said Hennessey. "I really like being the underdog."
In the lead up to the car's official unveiling, Hennessey will be releasing teaser videos setting the scene and divulging little snippets of information.
