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Hennessey Venom F5 has a new carbon fiber tub and dreams of big speed

Will this fancy new structure be enough to help the company achieve its 310.7-mph aspirations?

Kyle Hyatt Former news and features editor
Kyle Hyatt (he/him/his) hails originally from the Pacific Northwest, but has long called Los Angeles home. He's had a lifelong obsession with cars and motorcycles (both old and new).
Kyle Hyatt
2 min read

Way back in the good ol' days of the mid-2000s and early 2010s, there was a near-constant back and forth between the folks at Bugatti and the people from Hennessey Performance Engineering over who built the world's fastest production car.

One company would claim a record, then the other would turn up the boost and release a special edition or something, and claim it for itself. It was mostly pointless -- where can you really drive 250-plus miles per hour if you're just an average filthy-rich person? But it did at least make for some interesting reading.

Fast-forward to 2020, and the wild bunch from Sealy, Texas, hasn't given up yet. Hennessey is still after the crown, and it finally ditched the wildly mutated platform that the Hennessey Venom had been built upon in favor of a fancy new all-carbon fiber tub -- which the company announced on Monday -- like a real-deal factory-built supercar.

The Hennessey Venom F5, as it's now called, will benefit from this new, lighter and stiffer chassis structure in several ways. Because it's lighter, that means there's less weight for the F5's 6.6-liter 1,800-horsepower V8 to lug around. It being stiffer means that the company will have to brace the chassis in fewer areas, again leading to less weight. A carbon chassis will also likely improve the crashworthiness of the Venom.

Hennessey says that the chassis has been in development for over two years and that it boasts a torsional rigidity of 38,353 pound-feet of torque per degree of deflection. Oh, and the whole thing weighs just 190 lbs. CEO John Hennessey says he hopes that the new tub will give the Venom F5 enough of a performance bump to help it reach 310.7 mph.

If you want a Hennessey Venom and you're as rich as Croesus (i.e. very rich), then you'd better hurry up and place your $1.8 million order. The company has committed to building just 24 of these maniacal machines, with only 12 slated for the United States, and the word 'round the campfire is that the US allotment is nearly sold out.

Brace for 300 mph in the Hennessey Venom F5

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Watch this: John Hennessey talks about the Venom F5 and taking on Bugatti