FRESNO (California): To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Hennessey Performance took its Venom GT Spyder hypercar to the track and hit a staggering, supercar-shaming 427.44kph.
That phenomenal turn of speed, courtesy of a 7-litre V8 force fed by two turbochargers means that the car, driven on the runway by Brian Smith, the director of Ford Performance's Driving School, is only 8kph slower than its hardtop brethren.
What's more, technically speaking, the car, built in Texas through a combination of American engineering knowhow and Lotus Exige parts, is somewhat faster than a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport Vitesse, a car that cost billions of euros and 10 years to develop and which set a Guinness World Record speed of 408.84kph in 2013.
"2016 marks the 25th anniversary of Hennessey Performance", said company founder, John Hennessey. "I thought that this would be a special way to celebrate 25 years of making fast cars faster. I've wanted to test the top speed of our Venom GT Spyder, without the roof, ever since our coupe ran 435.17kph on the Space Shuttle landing runway at Nasa's Kennedy Space Center in 2014. This was a great way to validate the technical excellence of our car which includes high-speed stability with an open roof."
However, the top speed, though independently verified by Racelogic VBox, won't be giving Bugatti sleepless nights.
No matter what boutique car companies can achieve, the Bugatti is still the world's fastest production car, roof up or down. Until companies like Hennessey are able to build more than 30 identical examples of their cars (the Guinness definition of production), and complete two runs of a track (from which an average is taken) they will not be able to claim the Guinness World Record.
Nevertheless, the achievement is still phenomenal, and to help gearheads in the US and petrolheads in Europe celebrate, Hennessey will be building three World Record Edition models of the hypercar, each with a US$1.3mil (RM5mil) price tag.
