Supercharger Calculators: Hennessey Venom GT Shows American Tuning Prowess To The World

This car looks like just like the Lotus Exige, and it is. But some major work by Texas-based Hennessey has transformed this street-legal track car into a weapon that even the mighty Veyron should fear. John Hennessey is famous for his thousand-horsepower Vipers and after an event a few years ago, Hennessey wondered what a good project car would be. According to him, "One day I joked about putting the Venom 1000 Twin Turbo engine in the back of a Lotus Exige. Then I thought, let's do a sketch and see what that might look like.”

The design brief was to produce the maximum power to weight ratio in a road-going car. And with the help of an engineering firm in England, Hennessey was able to achieve this goal, by having a car with 1G of acceleration in the lower gears. To achieve this performance, the tuner used a 6.2-liter Chevy V8 with twin Garrett turbos to produce 1200 horsepower and 1155 pounds-feet of torque. Locating this engine and a 6-speed transmission in an engine bay designed for a naturally-aspirated 4-cylinder took refabrication of the aluminum monocoque and the addition of a chromoly structure. Carbon-ceramic brakes from Brembo and KW adjustable suspension complete the major changes to the car. CFD enabled Hennessey to design and manage airflow for the engine and the car in the computer even before the first custom parts were built. Even with the Ricardo 6-speed and twin turbo V8, weight distribution is 44/56, so the car shouldn’t be as tail-happy as you would think. This makes the car live up to the handling prowess that Lotus is famous for.

The Venom GT weighs in at 2685 pounds, which is equivalent to a 2005 Ford Focus. Superlatives are not enough anymore to describe the performance of this car. Just content yourselves with the car’s performance, which is 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds and a quarter-mile time of 9.9 seconds. Sprinting to 200 mph (which a lot of cars can’t even manage) can be done in a fraction under 16 seconds. A Bugatti Veyron needs about 24 seconds to do this. For now, only 10 or less cars will be built annually, at a price tag in today’s currency of $1 million per copy.

On the dyno