Hennessey Reveals Customer-Spec Venom F5

Jul. 20, 2021 6:37 AM ET by Jake Lingeman Supercars / 9 Comments

The American-made hypercar looks ready for a rich-guy car meet in Santa Monica.

We talk a lot about Hennessey Performance Engineering and it's hopped-up Ford Mustangs, Broncos and Ram TRXs. But the Texas tuner has quite a following building cars of its own, though they too are usually based on something. It's Venom series first came from the Viper in the Venom 650R. Its record-breaking Venom GT was a bigger, more powerful Lotus. Now we get to its latest creation, the 100% bespoke Venom F5, which saw one of its first customer specifications picked out this week.

The car has been ordered by the self-proclaimed "Billion Dollar Brand Builder" Howard Panes, who made at least some of his money in the personal training game. Panes owns a selection of amazing supercars including a Porsche 918 Spyder, McLaren P1, a Lamborghini Huracan Spyder Performante, a couple of Ferraris and more. Soon it will joined by this Gulf-Oil-adjacent (the color is called Blue Arione) Venom F5.

The F5 was priced at $1.6 million, but as the limited edition run continued the cost went up to $2.1 million. The F5 may eventually be the fastest car in the world if Hennessey can take the record back from the SSC Tuatara, which clocked a two-way average speed of 282.9 mph last year. Hennessey says the F5 aims to exceed 311 mph on a two-way validated speed run soon.

The F5 has a 6.6-liter twin-turbocharged pushrod V8 behind the driver making a frankly insane 1,817 hp and 1,193 lb-ft of torque. The engine is called "Fury" and is mated to a single-clutch automated manual transmission with paddle shifters. The sprint to 62 mph takes 2.6 seconds, 124 mph passes in 4.7 seconds and 186 mph (300 kph) can be hit in just 8.4 seconds.

The blue paint on the render looks good with orange accents. It does make the car look more pedestrian, if that's possible. The orange trim is great on the side skirts and rear diffuser and the high-mounted exhaust and honeycomb grille are giving McLaren vibes.

The interior is dominated by the yoke-style steering wheel with a Formula 1 race car's worth of buttons and dials. We can see a bright red ignition button, surrounded by headlight, wiper and volume knobs. Hennessey is going the way of Ferrari here, with all of the controls on the wheel. That's opposed to McLaren, which leaves its steering wheels completely plain. It has a screen for a gauge cluster and another for infotainment features. It's all very modern looking.

Hennessey is only building 24 examples in total, but as far as we've heard, they're not sold out. Crack open your checkbook and start clearing space in the garage.