ennessey Performance (HPE) will offer it's ultra lightweight supercar with a removable roof. Dubbed the Venom GT Spyder, Hennessey's 1200 horsepower, 1200 kilo, mid-engine monster will offer an extra dose of wind and sound when driven without the top.

"With the hardtop in place, the Venom GT offers a very visceral, raw, driving experience", says company CEO, Don Goldman. "With the hardtop removed, the wind and the growl of the twin turbo V8 will offer our clients an even greater driving sensation."

HPE will build just five Venom GTs for the 2013 model year, two of which have already been ordered. Deliveries will begin in the summer of 2012. Clients can purchase either model: the Venom GT - with a fixed hardtop roof, or the Venom GT Spyder - with the new removable top. Base pricing for the Venom GT is $950,000. The Venom GT Spyder is priced at $1.1 million.

"We are excited to be able to offer an open-air American supercar, built in Texas, that provides the best power to weight ratio available on the market," says company founder, John Hennessey. "Simply put, the Venom GT Spyder is defined by its simplicity, elegance, performance and - for a lucky few - a driving experience like nothing else on Earth."

For 2013 Hennessey will be offering an updated version of the Venom GT with 1500 bhp from a 7.0 liter (427) V8.

Updates to the body include increased headroom with a double bubble roof, new front headlights and a slightly revised front fascia.

The new car will have an optional 7-speed paddle-shift transmission.

More information will be available next year regarding price, name and specific power numbers.

Hennessey Venom GT breaks acceleration record
The supercar from Texas beats Koenigsegg and Bugatti in an official Guinness match

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The world's fastest production car to reach 300 kilometers per hour from a standing start was dreamed and built just outside Houston.

The Hennessey Venom GT set a Guinness World Record for reaching 300 kph (186 mph) in 13.63 seconds, besting the Swedish-made Koenigsegg Agera R by almost a full second. To understand the gravity of those numbers, consider that the average family sedan needs seven or eight seconds to hit 60 mph. A Porsche 911 Turbo S, one of the world's hardest-accelerating​ sports cars save for a $2 million Bugatti Veyron, reaches 127 mph in about 11 seconds.

By unofficial record, the Venom GT smoked the Veyron Super Sport to 200 mph by nearly eight seconds. Aside from being dropped from a plane or taking off from an aircraft carrier, no acceleration a human being can feel on this earth is so murderous.


And yet, if you see the video below, the whole affair starts rather calmly, with a touch of wheel spin. Gear whine and whirring turbos dominate much of the furious soundtrack, and the flame-spitting engine remarkably doesn't go to pieces on the two Guinness runs, which Hennessey says were performed within one hour of each other. Hennessey, a tuner that recently clocked 220 mph on a Texas highway in a modified Cadillac, says this is "just the first of several validation tests." In other words, it wants to break the speed record held by the 268-mph Veyron Super Sport.


We're not sure how Hennessey customers, who include Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler, will be able to explore the Venom GT's explosive performance outside the 8,000-foot Texas airstrip where Guinness observed the record run. Loosely based on a Lotus Exige, the Venom GT packs 1,244 horsepower on just 2,743 pounds, giving it the kind of power-to-weight ratio that lets MotoGP cyclists run circles around most, if not all, 4-wheeled supercars. Now, it's founder John Hennessey's turn to shove his name in the face of Ferrari, Bugatti and anything else with a fancy European badge. (Of note, Hennessey has been talking about destroying Bugatti since at least 2006, when he introduced the Venom 1000, based on the last-generation Viper. Finally, all the talk is real.)

What's startling is that beyond the widened, stretched carbon-fiber body, the Venom GT is unusually old-school. Like the Agera, the Venom GT uses a twin-turbo V8 engine -- in this case, borrowed from the Corvette Z06 -- a manual transmission and rear-wheel drive. There is no idiot-proof automatic transmission and no dial to perfectly fine-tune the torque split. A quick time in a Venom GT, even with sticky Michelin Pilots and virtually no wind, owes as much to the driver as it does to the car.

Only 29 Venom GT models will be made for at least $1.2 million each, with about 10 already sold. That's not entirely what we would cite for a "production" car; the last Ferrari Enzo reached 400 cars, while Bugatti has made at least 300. Still, it's not from Maranello or Molsheim. It's from freakin' Texas.

On February 14, 2014, the Hennessey Venom GT set a new world speed record for 2-seat sports cars by reaching a top speed of 270.49 mph (435.31 km/h). The run was performed at the Kennedy Space Center on the 3.2-mile Space Shuttle landing runway. Brian Smith, Director of Miller Motorsport, experienced race driver and a former Michelin tire test engineer, drove the Venom GT to its record speed.

A representative from Racelogic, world-renowned maker of GPS data-acquisition systems, was on hand to independently verify and document the Venom GT’s speed record. “The Venom GT attained a maximum speed of 270.49 mph as measured by our VBOX 3i GPS system,” said Racelogic engineer Joe Lachovsky. The VBOX GPS data showed that the Venom GT was still accelerating at an average rate of 1 mph per second as it took just 10.1 seconds to go from 260 to 270 mph. The record run was made over a distance of 2.4 miles, which allowed the Venom just eight-tenths of a mile to stop. Thankfully, its Brembo carbon-ceramic brakes were able to haul the car down from 270 mph well before the end of the runway’s 1000-ft. threshold.

“I knew the car had it in it, but it’s a thrill to officially validate the Venom GT’s 270-mph speed,” said Hennessey CEO Don Goldman. “Venturing anywhere above 200 mph—let alone 270—is not to be taken lightly, and we’re elated to have accomplished our goal.”
The Hennessey team can now add absolute top speed to its growing list of speed records. The Venom GT also owns the title for world’s fastest from 0-300 km/h (13.63 sec.) and 0-200 mph (14.51 sec.). With a curb weight of 1,244 kilograms (2,743 lb.) and a power output of 1,244 bhp from its 7.0-liter twin turbo V8 engine, the Venom delivers 1 horsepower per kilogram of curb weight, making it the hardest-accelerating and fastest series-produced vehicle in the world.

Achieving the world record is a dream realized for company founder and president John Hennessey. “I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. Neil Armstrong was my childhood hero. Even though the astronaut thing didn’t work out for me, I am humbled to have had the opportunity to set our speed record on the hallowed grounds of the American space program,” said Hennessey. “Building and validating our Venom GT as the world’s fastest has been a long journey and a lot of hard work. But as President Kennedy once so eloquently said, ‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ As a result we have built a better car and a better team at Hennessey Performance (HPE).”

“It was still pulling,” said driver Brian Smith after the record run. “If we could run on an 8-mile oval we could go faster than that. On the very top end there was a little wandering but, hey, we’re going 270 mph! The Venom GT didn’t required any big corrections, and the Michelins held traction really well.”

To date, HPE has built and delivered eleven Venom GTs to owners around the world. Each vehicle is built to order and takes six months to complete. As the production run will be limited to a total of just 29 units worldwide, the Venom GT is not only the fastest but also one of the most exclusive hypercars ever produced. Its components and systems, by necessity, need to meet the extraordinary demands inherent in achieving such rarefied velocities, and the Venom GT’s Pennzoil Platinum synthetic motor oil is no exception. Said Chris Hayek, Global Brand Director for Pennzoil: “We constantly pursue the latest advancements in technology, and we couldn’t be more excited that Hennessey Performance achieved this world speed record using Pennzoil’s new full synthetic motor oil made from natural gas.”