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"  There are six Hennessey Venom GTs in the world. Only one is a convertible. That makes the ridiculous Venom GT Spyder I&amp;#039;m about to climb into even rarer than the Bugatti Veyron, the cruise-missile measuring stick for all hyperexotics.  The privilege of driving a Hennessey is limited to fewer than 20 people on the planet, six of whom have written seven-figure checks to have one in their garage. But should you ever beat those odds and find yourself behind the wheel of one, as I just have, you will find yourself completely ruined for all other sports cars. Nothing is as fast, as terrifying, or as thrilling as the Venom GT.  The Specs First, an insane person builds this car. John Hennessey has spent his career modifying sports cars to accelerate faster, and that&amp;#039;s pretty much it. This is a man who steps out of a Dodge Viper and concludes that what it really needs is 700 extra horsepower. At least it worked: The 1200-hp Hennessey Venom 1000 Viper beat the Bugatti Veyron to 200 mph by 4 seconds\u2014and somehow managed not to kill its pilot.  Horsepower is easy to come by today. A few short years ago my own 500-hp Corvette was a force to be reckoned with at the dragstrip; now it&amp;#039;s slow by comparison. Despite the hp boom, though, not everyone is building a Hennessey, and that&amp;#039;s because modern supercars are behemoths. Even the land yachts of the 1950&amp;#039;s were lighter. A Nissan GTR weighs 3800 pounds, 344 more than a 1957 Chevy Bel Air wagon. Hennessey realized this and went to battle with what really matters: power to weight ratio. In doing so, he looked back to the formula of another famous Texan, Carroll Shelby. By taking a lightweight British sports car (the AC Bristol) and dropping in the biggest American engine he could find, Carroll Shelby created the Cobra, a car so fast for its time that its performance numbers are still impressive 50 years later. Mr. Hennessey decided that he would also use a lightweight British car\u2014the Lotus Elise, the lightest full-body car on the market today.  Naysayers would argue that John Hennessey is ripping off people by selling them a Lotus with a V-8 in it for a million dollars. But the Venom&amp;#039;s entire body is handmade out of carbon fiber, save the original doors. Hennessey redesigned the entire front and rear subframes from scratch to support the longer wheelbase and weight of the engine. The suspension, a height-adjustable Penske coilover setup with front-end lift to clear driveways and speed bumps, is unique to this car. There are additional radiators, cooling lines, and ductwork to keep the massive engine cool, not to mention 24-karat-gold-leaf heat shields in the engine compartment, just like the McLaren F1 has. And the entire car is hand-built. Now, the engine. It&amp;#039;s based on the GM LSX block, but the Venom GT gets a unique casting unlike a standard LSX crate motor. It&amp;#039;s stroked to 7 liters, with fully forged internals. From the driver&amp;#039;s seat you can adjust the two 67-mm Precision Turbos to spool 10, 13, or 20 pounds of boost, depending on how much road you have, or how quickly you&amp;#039;d like to die. Low boost means the engine will crank out a mere 800 hp. Medium bumps the madness to 1000 hp. The full boost setting puts out a fire-breathing, grim-reaper-welcoming 1244 hp into a car that weighs about as much as a Scion FR-S. Oh, and the Venom Spyder has no airbags, no traction control, and no roof. The good news is that the Venom GT makes 1050 pounds of downforce at 150 mph. It&amp;#039;s not exactly slippery, with a drag coefficient of 0.43, but at least it will stick to the ground.  Because every Venom GT built is presold, an official top speed run hasn&amp;#039;t been attempted. (Hennessey says top speed was never a priority with this car, simply a side effect.) Theoretically, the CFD engineers say it will do 272 mph. We do know the Venom will make 200 mph from a dead standstill in just 15.3 seconds.   The Drive If the Venom GT&amp;#039;s specs don&amp;#039;t terrify you as you climb through the integrated suede-wrapped roll cage into the cockpit, its absurd price will. The Venom GT Spyder costs $1.1 Million. This one, chassis No. 1, was recently delivered to Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and has fewer than 300 miles on the odometer. I could barely afford to replace one tire. One missed shift, one missed braking point, one inattentive second behind the wheel and my career, my bank account, or my life could cease to exist.  Oh, but the engine sounds incredible. It&amp;#039;s distinctly American yet with an exotic flavor. There is a cammy rumble at idle that evens out as soon as you hit the throttle. Even off-boost, there is 600 lb-ft of torque. It pushes the car along as though it were nothing.  Gradually I get more confident with the accelerator, and every increase in rpm brings the shrieking howl of the exhaust accompanied by the rising whoosh of the turbochargers. The Fast and the Furious fans would go crazy for the noises the Venom makes every time I shift the slick six-speed transmission (a Ricardo unit from the Ford GT.) It&amp;#039;s not exactly a car for the freeway commute: The clutch throw is 3 inches at most and stiff, and pedals are so close together that I have to remove my size 12EE New Balances to drive it. But the pedal feel is perfect, and heel-toe downshifting is simple and straightforward. Finally, with enough road in front of me, I shift into third gear and put my foot into it.  Now, I&amp;#039;ve driven a lot of fast cars. And there is nothing like the feeling you get when you floor the Venom GT. It&amp;#039;s not that the car moves fast; it&amp;#039;s that the earth stops and starts going the other direction. Space and time cease to exist; only g-forces and speed remain.  I don&amp;#039;t care if the dashboard comes from a Lotus. I don&amp;#039;t care that it&amp;#039;s basically built in a shed in Texas. This is the angriest machine I have had the pleasure of driving, and I once owned a Shelby Cobra with a Nascar engine in it. I&amp;#039;d tell you how fast I was going, but I have no idea; I was too afraid to look away from the road. All I can tell you is I made it to the top of fourth gear before the road, like my guts, ran out.  According to Mr. Hennessey, whom I now believe 100 percent on all things concerning ludicrous speed, the car will spin the wheels shifting into sixth at 190 mph. I thank all that is holy that the man was at least smart enough to install 15-inch six-piston Brembo carbon ceramic brakes, because this kind of acceleration is so addictive that there is just never enough road. Even racetracks aren&amp;#039;t long or open enough. You need a runway\u2014a really, really long one.  When I got back to John&amp;#039;s shop, he says I was on the low boost setting the whole time. He offered to let me try one of the higher boost settings, but I declined. Honestly, it&amp;#039;s just too much for public roads. When Hennessey finishes the next car, which will be his personal car used for development and media testing, I will go down to Texas and try maximum boost. But not in California, not on public roads, not today.   The Bottom Line Although I had no idea the Venom GT would be quite so mind-bending, I expected fast. I expected it to handle well, which it does, even with a longer wheelbase than the Lotus (though for reasons of sanity I didn&amp;#039;t push the handling to its limits).  What I did not expect was that the electronic power steering would be so light or that the interior would actually be comfortable. I didn&amp;#039;t expect that the ride quality would be so much better than the Lotus on which it&amp;#039;s based, or how rigid the chassis would feel. Hell, I didn&amp;#039;t even think it would clear the driveway out of Hennessey&amp;#039;s Lake Forest, Calif., shop, but thanks to the front-end lift system, it did. Who knew an underfunded company using a hodgepodge of parts could build a car that somehow feels so complete?  It&amp;#039;d be easy to dismiss John Hennessey because of his controversial reputation or because the Venom GT rides a fine line between tuner car and production car. It&amp;#039;d be easy to say that charging a million dollars for a machine not made completely of unique parts is a scam. But no other road car, save for dedicated drag machines or Bonneville Salt Flat racers, can outpace the Venom GT. To come even close to this car&amp;#039;s performance you&amp;#039;d need a Koenigsegg Agera R, which costs $230,000 more than the Venom and isn&amp;#039;t legal to drive on U.S. soil. The equally exotic Pagani Huayara costs $2 Million; the Veyron Super Sport $2.2 Million. By comparison, a million bucks for the Venom GT is a bargain.  The only reason the Venom GT was built in the first place was that, upon seeing the handdrawn sketches four years ago, three people instantly put down deposits. This is a low-volume car for people who have no problem writing a seven-figure check to own the most exhilarating machine money can buy. The critics should be lucky enough to spend just a few minutes behind the wheel of a Hennessey Venom GT, at which point they&amp;#039;d change their tune about this rolling merchant of death.  Consider me converted. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a7940/hennessey-venom-gt-the-fastest-car-i-will-ever-drive-10786042/>