Two things happen when the guy sitting next to me floors the gas pedal of his $2.7 million car. First, the raspy growl of the 1,817-horsepower engine mutates from that of a cornered wolf to something even more feral and dangerous. It’s a roar fueled by so much gasoline that, at top speed, the vehicle could travel only about fifteen miles before needing a refill. Second, as we rocket past 100 miles per hour, the combination of speed and unrelenting acceleration sucks the scenery along both sides of the test track into a blurred tunnel of green, as if the Millennium Falcon has just engaged its hyperdrive in a field west of Houston.
At 170 mph, just about three seconds later, the far end of the straightaway hurtles perilously close. It’s time to throttle the machine back down to highway speed and take a cool-down lap. I can’t suppress the kind of giddiness that comes after a roller-coaster ride. “Holy s—,” I say at least three times in the next few moments.
“You just can’t describe to people what that feels like,” says John Hennessey, my driver and the car’s creator. It’s called a Venom F5 and is 1 of only 24 in existence. All of them were hand built by a small crew in a hangarlike building across a parking lot from the track. The structure houses the headquarters and production facility for Hennessey Performance, a tuning shop that makes fast cars faster, and Hennessey Special Vehicles, the boutique automaker behind the F5 (named after the Fujita-scale rating for the most dangerous tornadoes).
“This is a car that I never get used to,” Hennessey continues, as we ease back toward the garage. Weekday-morning traffic zips past on the stretch of Interstate 10 abutting his company’s property, near Sealy. “Like, I’ll drive a Corvette with six-hundred-seventy horsepower and get used to that after a couple days. But this I’ll never get used to. Ever.” He veers into a story about a customer who upholsters every vehicle he owns, including his personal helicopter, with the hides of water buffalo he’s shot in Africa. The point, Hennessey eventually explains, is that people do outrageous things—like buy one of his cars—simply because they can. “Nobody needs what we sell,” he says. “You can buy a really nice Ford Focus for $35,000, or even a Tesla Model 3. So every dollar spent above that is spent based on passion and emotion.”
Hennessey, boyish at 61 with ruddy cheeks and a thatch of yellow hair, is a swirl of contradictions. On paper he’s a swashbuckling man of mystery, a former race car driver who builds fantastical machines that sell for millions of dollars. By reputation in the auto industry—even the renegade corner of it that he inhabits—he’s a bit of a loose cannon, a controversial guy who doesn’t play by the rules and sometimes gets himself in trouble. But in person he’s mild mannered, more of a comfortable-sneakers dad than a muscle car meathead, until one of his many stories highlights the swashbuckling part again, along with his talent for self-promotion.
In 2012, he told me, he met David Dewhurst, shortly after the then–lieutenant governor of Texas lost to Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate primary. Dewhurst was “licking his wounds” on a golf vacation at Pebble Beach, in California, and Hennessey was there for the annual Concours d’Elegance auto show. At the time, the Texas Highway 130 toll road was under construction east of Austin, and Hennessey proposed a deal to Dewhurst. “I said, ‘If you’ll give me access to that road before it opens,’ ” Hennessey recalls, “ ‘I’ll bring some cars that’ll break two hundred miles an hour, and we’ll make sure the whole world knows about that road.’ ” A few months later, Dewhurst was on hand, along with a film crew, to watch as a Hennessey Cadillac topped 220 mph just outside Lockhart, ostensibly to test whether toll tags could be scanned at high speed.
If there’s a stunt that’s made Hennessey more famous than any other (and given his life more purpose than any other), it’s breaking the world record for fastest production car—a vehicle that’s street legal and available to purchase. He did it back in 2014 (maybe—more on that to come) with the predecessor to the F5, the since discontinued Venom GT. The standing record at the time—at least by some metrics—was 268 mph, and belonged to the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, a 1,200-horsepower car that cost about $2.5 million. Hennessey shocked the automotive world when one of his test drivers topped 270 mph in the Venom GT on a 3.2-mile-long NASA runway near Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the space shuttles used to land. That’s about 40 mph faster than the top speed for most Formula One race cars.
But a newer Bugatti, the 1,600-horsepower special edition Chiron Super Sport, exceeded a shocking 304 mph in 2019. Sometime around the end of this year, or early next, Hennessey intends to make a run at that mark, ideally by hitting 311 mph, or roughly 500 kilometers per hour, a nice round number the Europeans can easily remember. Whether the new car can do it is far from certain. The specs suggest it’s possible, but the list of things that could go wrong is long, and Hennessey faces stiff competition. He’ll likely never have the resources of some of his biggest rivals, including Bugatti, which is based in France and part-owned by Volkswagen, one of the world’s largest carmakers. So why bother? Because he can. And it’ll make a great story in any case.
Thirty years ago, when Hennessey was working as an asbestos-removal contractor in Houston, he got the idea to start racing cars. He’d grown up in Kansas City, the son of an insurance adjuster who used to let young John sit in his lap and steer his 1964 Pontiac GTO. At sixteen, Hennessey bought a neighbor’s ’69 Oldsmobile 442 convertible, a model known as a “gentleman’s muscle car.” He promptly flipped over the lid of the carburetor’s airbox, hoping to boost the car’s performance, thanks to the increased air intake. He moved to Houston a couple of years later, in 1983, and met his wife, Hope, in a Sunday school class at Second Baptist Church. One night in 1990, when they had tickets to see The Nutcracker, he appeared before her on a white horse and proposed outside a downtown restaurant.
By then his knack for tinkering with cars had grown into an obsession. He’d bought and modified an Audi rally car and then a Mitsubishi 3000 GT. To test his handiwork, he zeroed in on an event called the Nevada Open Road Challenge, a race on a desolate stretch of highway that begins outside a copper-mining town in the high desert. When he blew out a tire in a qualifying run in May 1991 and dented the wheel, Hennessey didn’t have any spares with him, so he heated the rim’s aluminum with a blowtorch and hammered it straight enough to hold the tire. He raced on it two days later. He’d been told to enter the 140-mph class but found himself approaching 160 as he passed car after car. That’s when he felt his foot twitching on the gas, hesitating to push his luck any further for fear the wheel wouldn’t hold. So, as he tells it, “I took my left foot, and I had to mash it on top of my right foot to keep it on the gas to kind of overcome my nerves.”
Hennessey intends to make a run at Bugatti’s mark, ideally by hitting 311 mph, or roughly 500 kilometers per hour, a nice round number the Europeans can easily remember.
Next he signed up to race at Pikes Peak, in a legendary annual contest in Colorado in which drivers climb nearly five thousand feet to the top of a mountain, on twelve and a half miles of road that includes 156 turns. Pikes Peak attracts all kinds of drivers and cars—from Formula racers to souped-up stock cars. Other competitors showed up with their cars on trailers, along with support teams and trucks full of tools and spare tires. Hennessey had just crammed what he could into his Mitsubishi’s trunk and driven it up from Houston. He finished tenth out of twelve in his division.
Word started getting around about this crazy Texan, and other car obsessives began to ask him to do to their vehicles what he’d done to his. He shut down his asbestos-abatement business, rented a garage, and started tricking out mass-produced sports cars—the Mazda RX-7, the Toyota Supra, and so on—mostly to fund his racing hobby.
It wasn’t the first time an outsider Texan had made a swaggering entrance into the heights of automotive performance. In the fifties, Dallas-raised Carroll Shelby, a former military test pilot, turned a streak of wins behind the wheel into a partnership with Ford to produce the Shelby Cobra. The roadster with voluptuous curves and a monster V-8 engine was built expressly to defeat Ferraris and Corvettes on the track—which it did. That led to a series of Shelby-modified Fords, beginning with a GT350 Mustang that helped kick off the muscle car era. His Ford GT40 endurance racer won the 24 Hours of Le Mans race four years in a row and inspired a 2019 Matt Damon movie. Twelve years after his death, Shelby remains a mythical figure in the auto world, and his name has become practically synonymous with American horsepower.
In 1993 a customer from Dallas asked Hennessey to modify a Dodge Viper, a new model intended as a modern take on Shelby’s Cobra. The Viper ran on a V-10 engine designed with the help of Lamborghini, and it lacked basic comforts, such as air-conditioning, to keep its weight down. The Viper was so primed for speed that it was notoriously difficult to control.
Hennessey added about 100 horsepower and renamed the car the Viper Venom 500. He persuaded the client to let him take it to Los Angeles to show off to some writers for industry publications, and that’s when his reputation as a madman took hold. Motor Trend labeled another early Venom model “the scariest street car we’ve ever tested” and practically ran out of words trying to describe it: “So far past the line of sanity, it’s become wholly and unequivocally demented. . . . The sound is so overwhelming, and the vibration so severe, it’s like driving a four-wheel Harley-Davidson Fat Boy inside a big metallic Cuisinart.”
Jay Leno, who has famously amassed one of the world’s great car collections, called Hennessey to buy parts to modify his own Viper, according to the company. So did Bob Lutz, an auto-industry legend who dreamed up the Viper when he was a top executive at Chrysler. For the next decade, Vipers were pretty much all Hennessey worked on. That was enough to grow a bustling business, with about a dozen employees. But as the orders and money rolled in, Hennessey didn’t manage the shop efficiently. Some cars weren’t produced on time, or even to spec.
“Viper Specialist John Hennessey Is Up to His Cylinder Heads in Problems,” barked a 2002 headline in Autoweek, followed by an article detailing several lawsuits and alleging, most explosively, that Hennessey was stripping customers’ vehicles for parts, and even fraudulently misrepresenting his shop’s work by using stock Chrysler parts instead of upgrades. Hennessey admits he was operationally in over his head; he settled some of the claims and vigorously denied others.
The controversies prompted Hennessey to take a step back and rebuild his operation as a proper business, instead of an overbooked enthusiast’s shop. As the Viper’s popularity dipped in the ensuing years, Hennessey branched out to tuning Camaros, Challengers, Chargers, Mustangs, and more. In 2009 he took on a partner, a former customer named Don Goldman, who had experience as a manufacturing executive and came on as CEO. The company relocated to its current headquarters—a former drag strip, the Lonestar Motorsports Park—and a devilish idea lodged itself in Hennessey’s brain.
He’d built a twin-turbo Viper with 1,100 horsepower and taken it to a naval air station in California for a 2007 Road & Track competition that sought the car with the quickest acceleration from 0 to 200 mph. His Viper beat a Bugatti Veyron, then the fastest production car in the world, head-to-head by an impressive margin of nearly four seconds. (Hennessey: 20.3 seconds; Bugatti: 24.2.) His secret was a system that rationed out power the faster the car went, so that the driver could maintain traction and not lose time spinning out with too much power at low speeds. “From 100 to 200 mph, in that rarefied arena where precious few cars can play, the Viper absolutely devours the competition,” the magazine wrote.
It didn’t escape Hennessey’s notice that in the process of winning the acceleration event, his car also broke a Road & Track record by exceeding 220 mph in a single mile. What would it take, he wondered, to beat the Bugatti’s top speed, which then stood at nearly 254 mph?
That fall, at the Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show—one of the annual highlights of the hot-rod calendar—Hennessey showed a blogger from a site called Streetfire a rough sketch he’d ordered. It featured a modified Lotus Exige, a British-made sports car known for being featherlight, into which he imagined dropping that twin-turbo V-10 Viper engine. Hennessey dubbed his creation the Venom GT. The blogger dutifully reported his scoop, and a couple of weeks later Hennessey issued a press release that threw down the gauntlet to Bugatti: “The Venom GT will be a much more engaging sports car to drive by challenging the driver with 1000+ HP in a chassis that is nearly 1,500 lbs lighter than the Veyron.”
The car went into production in 2010, and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler bought the first convertible version in 2012. Then, on Valentine’s Day in 2014, a driver waved an American flag out the window of a silver Venom GT after it clocked 270 mph at Cape Canaveral. It was a new world record—or so it seemed. Nobody questioned that the Venom GT had gone faster than the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport’s previous mark. But for the speed to be official, the Guinness Book of World Records requires an average of two runs, going in opposite directions, to control for the effect of wind. Hennessey’s car had been driven only one way. What’s more, for Guinness to consider it a production car, there needs to be thirty of them, and Hennessey had built just eleven GTs at the time (and ultimately stopped at thirteen). Some automotive enthusiasts, meanwhile, complained that Hennessey’s car wasn’t truly his, given that it was built on a Lotus chassis.
To John Hennessey, there was only one response: he would have to build a second record-breaking car, this time from scratch.
Like many kids of the eighties, I grew up with a poster of a red Lamborghini Countach taped to the wall of my bedroom. I’d pulled it from the center of one of the car magazines I obsessively read, from whose coverage I’d learned that in 1982 the Countach set the world production-car speed record at 182 miles per hour. A Countach back then cost $102,500, a figure that I simply couldn’t wrap my head around. My parents had paid $85,000 for a four-bedroom house just a year earlier. How could a car cost more than our home?
These Lamborghinis, along with the Ferraris of the time, were so exotic that they weren’t merely sports cars. They were “supercars.” The Countach’s predecessor, the Lamborghini Miura (which held the speed record from 1969 until the Countach took it) is often cited as the first to earn the name. Around 2000, though, a new term was popularized, denoting a class of automobile far less ordinary than a simple Lambo: enter the “hypercar.” Whereas supercars will rocket from 0 to 60 in less than 3.5 seconds and hit speeds as fast as 200 mph, hypercars tend to reach 60 in less than three seconds and approach 300 mph. A supercar costs more than $100,000, while hypercars can run more than $2 million.
As his follow-up to the Venom GT, Hennessey pledged in August 2014 to build a hypercar. The problem was, business took a turn for the worse again. As Hennessey focused more attention on producing the GT, he took his eye off the tuning shop, and many of the same kinds of problems from a decade earlier cropped up.
An explosive 2016 article on the influential car news site Jalopnik cited ex-employees corroborating client accusations that included “misusing company funds; using one customer’s deposit to build another one’s car; passing off subpar parts and components as exclusive and top-of-the-line equipment; using underhanded tactics designed to prevent clients from getting refunds; and consistently failing to deliver certain customers’ cars—especially when they were foreign buyers.” The same employees maintained that CEO Don Goldman had been a stabilizing force at Hennessey, but by then he’d left the company.
Hennessey thinks of himself as an artist whose medium is motors and metal. It’s a convenient way to explain away the organizational dysfunction, but it also has the ring of truth.
Today, sitting in a conference room overlooking the company’s showroom while cars ripping down the test track provide a snarling soundtrack, Hennessey balances casting blame—without ever naming Goldman specifically—with taking some responsibility. “I was doing the creative and sales and marketing, and he was supposed to be running the business—but he wasn’t really running the business,” he says. “You get into a situation where you’re robbing Peter and paying Paul, and we were being told by the former partner that everything is running fine, until we start seeing signs that it wasn’t running fine.”
The company teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, Hennessey says, and it was “upside down by about four million dollars on the balance sheet.” Goldman stands by his work and the financial condition of the company when he left in mid 2015 while still owning 50 percent of the company. “The builds we did were high quality and lived up to the performance expectations of any customer we ever had,” he says. Regardless, the number of employees dwindled from about thirty to a dozen.
At one point, Hennessey tried to sell 55 of the company’s 142 acres, including the racetrack, but didn’t draw any offers worth accepting. Reddit threads and other online commentary painted him as a thief and a liar, but he’d built enough credibility in the industry to keep a steady flow of vehicles coming in for modifications. While his skeleton crew worked on those, he tried to placate angry customers and vendors by simply asking for their forbearance. “Look, I’ve been doing this for a long time,” he’d say. “I don’t know how I’m going to pay you, but we will get it figured out.”
Hennessey thinks of himself as a kind of artist, one whose medium is motors and metal. It’s a convenient way to explain away some of the organizational dysfunction, but it also has the ring of truth. Sometimes his bolts of creative inspiration take him in odd directions—like the time he “took a gummy bear” on a red-eye flight home from Los Angeles and stayed up all night writing a Broadway-style musical about “empowering women and eighties-type music.” The show never got made—“I’m told these productions are a total money pit,” he says—but he’s holding on to the idea for another day.
Everything changed for Hennessey when Ford released its second-generation Raptor pickup truck, in 2017. He had souped up the first Raptor, which was itself a more powerful F-150. His version, the VelociRaptor, had been a steady seller, and it hurt when Ford discontinued the truck in 2014. Looking for a way to reignite that line of business, Hennessey brainstormed a next-generation VelociRaptor with six-wheel-drive—that is, a third axle next to the rear one, with twenty-inch oversized wheels. The truck would resemble a tank almost as much as a pickup.
He had an artist draw a rendering, released it to the auto press, and watched VelociRaptor preorders start tumbling in. His talent for creative stunts paid off once again. He’d make only about twenty of the 6×6 trucks, which cost at least $350,000 each, but the public relations bonanza sold thousands of his comparatively modest 4×4 VelociRaptors. “We had a two million dollar backlog of orders before the first truck even showed up,” Hennessey says. “We had enough profitability from the Raptor to pay off all the old stuff, to buy out the old partner, and to help us with designing the F5”—the new Bugatti-beating hypercar he was dreaming up.
One metric matters more than any other if you’re trying to create a hypercar: the power-to-weight ratio. You want maximum force from a minimal mass. At the most basic level, there are two ways to increase the power generated by an internal combustion engine. You can design it to consume more fuel, and you can make it spin faster. Americans have traditionally leaned more heavily on the former, while Europeans prefer the latter.
Hennessey, unsurprisingly, is all-American. His big V-8 F5 engine, nicknamed Fury, not only features abundant space within the cylinders for igniting the mixture of fuel and air but also uses twin turbochargers to force in more compressed air. That combination burns more gas and, along with custom-built lightweight components, results in an astounding 1,800-plus horsepower.
Decreasing the weight is trickier. Large engines are heavy, so everything else in the car must be as light as possible. Whereas the Venom GT’s Lotus chassis was made of aluminum, the F5’s is carbon fiber, weighing a fraction as much while being much stronger (and more expensive). Every body panel and interior panel is carbon fiber too. The creature comforts are minimal. There are no cup holders. The seat cushions are about one inch thick. There aren’t even airbags—which, for a street-legal drag racer, is a provocative choice.
The resulting car weighs fewer than three thousand pounds, with a nearly unprecedented power-to-weight ratio. The Bugatti Chiron weighs more than four thousand pounds. The difference, Hennessey says, is that where the Bugatti is both fast and posh, the F5 is just fast. “The Bugatti is designed to be luxurious. It’s like a Bentley with fifteen-hundred horsepower.” His favorite descriptions for the F5 are “emotional,” “raw,” and “unapologetic.”
A host of other variables determines whether a hypercar is even drivable, let alone safe. “Any time you’re over two hundred miles per hour, you’re in the death zone,” says Jason Harper, a veteran automotive journalist and communications consultant. “You’re fighting the chance of something going wrong. If you blow a tire, you’re done”—which is a real risk. Normal tires will burn up at the speeds Hennessey aspires to.
Aerodynamics can make the difference between life and death too. Without sufficient downforce—applied by the air resistance to those large wings on the back of race cars—the vehicle might lift off the road and flip end over end. But downforce also slows a car, so you don’t want too much of it. Braking quickly and safely from 200-plus miles per hour back to 0 is a whole other challenge. The list goes on. Bugatti, for example, built the Chiron’s front grill out of titanium specifically to protect the radiator from 250-mph bird strikes.
Heath Norton, the president of Callies Performance Products, an Ohio company that makes the customized oversized crankshafts in the F5 engine, marvels at Hennessey’s audacity. “Especially when you’re competing with more established, larger companies,” he says. “I can’t begin to impress on you how hard it is to do what Hennessey has done. To say, ‘We want to build a new car’—I hear that and shudder.”
That degree of difficulty, taken together with the allegations of fraud and shortcuts, leads many in the car community to doubt Hennessey and dismiss the F5 as more hype machine than hypercar. Norton has heard all the criticism but draws a more charitable conclusion. “There are a lot of crooks in this industry,” he says, “but there are also people who get painted as crooks who are dreamers, and their dreams outweigh their ability to finance inventory. [Hennessey] can’t build a car if he’s missing one part. If it’s back-ordered for twelve weeks, he is dead in the water. And if he’s not shipping cars, he’s not getting paid.”
Hennessey has built 24 F5s, all but one of which are owned by someone other than him. Michael Jordan bought an F5. So did a pair of Apple executives, Hennessey notes, and a third of the cars are in Miami. The buyers pay cash.
Ready for doughnuts?” asks Alex Roys, the 29-year-old president of the Hennessey Group, the umbrella company that includes Hennessey Performance, Hennessey Special Vehicles, and a training school for tuning mechanics. We’re at the far end of the test track in a supercharged Cadillac CT5-V that has been modified to 1,000 horsepower, and he proceeds to smoke the tires and spin us in circles.
Roys, who grew up near the Hennesseys in Houston, first joined the company in 2012, as a high school student washing cars. John and Hope had five blond kids—JP, Emma, Cole, Ryland, and Savannah—in a six-year span in the nineties, and Alex became something like a sixth. He attended school in the same class as JP, the eldest of the Hennessey kids, and he briefly dated Emma, the second oldest, back then. She put him in the friend zone for seven years after that, but he persisted, and now they’re married.
Ten minutes before doing doughnuts in the Cadillac, Roys and I caught some air while barreling off-road through a field at 70 miles per hour in a Mammoth edition Dodge Ram TRX, also with 1,000 horsepower and billed as the world’s most powerful truck. In a 2022 review of the Mammoth TRX, Top Gear called it “utterly unjustifiable on every level” and “a rolling metaphor for America’s worst excesses.” (It could be read as a compliment.)
Roys, who wears a closely trimmed beard and speaks with the casual polish of a business school grad, explains that the success of the VelociRaptor changed the focus of the company, from fast cars to fast trucks. “We found our formula for making trucks the Hennessey way,” he says. “Branded bumpers and lights, a lift, wheels and tires, electronic side steps, a bed cover, and some extra horsepower. When you put it all together, it’s very appealing to that high-end guy who is an entrepreneur, a go-getter, an executive.”
Recent customers include musician Post Malone and celebrity podcaster Joe Rogan. Over the years, other famous faces behind the wheel of Hennessey creations include athletes Tim Duncan and Tony Hawk, and country music star Tim McGraw. Of the 25 upgrade packages offered on Hennessey’s website, 16 are for trucks or SUVs, from F-150s all the way up to Escalades.
Hennessey brought in $5 million in 2016 but ended the year with a loss, according to the company. In 2023 the haul was $63 million, with a profit. Two years ago, John and Hope bought J. J. Watt’s sprawling mansion after the Houston Texans star defensive end moved to join the Arizona Cardinals.
The Hennessey Group employs about one hundred, most of them on the tuning side and about twenty working on the F5. John has stepped back from day-to-day involvement in business operations and is focused more on product development and promotion, including plotting various record-setting attempts. More often than not, he stays at his home office in Houston rather than driving to Sealy. That makes his son-in-law, Roys, who joined the company full-time in 2016 after earning a degree from Texas A&M University, the de facto leader at headquarters.
Roys is not the only younger member of the family who could take over one day. All of the Hennessey kids have worked in the family business at one point or another. Both Cole, who works in sales, and Ryland, who works in engineering, told me they hope to stay with the company for the rest of their lives. “It’s a little bit different for me because at the end of the day, my name’s not on the building,” Roys says. I point out that he’s officially part of the family now that he’s married into it. “I am,” he concedes, “but at the same time I never will be.”
One day last spring, a Hennessey Venom F5 ran the fastest lap ever by a production car at the Circuit of the Americas racetrack, outside Austin. The car, black and menacing like a Batmobile, topped the previous mark set by a model from Los Angeles hypercar maker Czinger. The F5 reached 193 miles per hour on the back straightaway, only about 20 mph behind the top speed of a Formula 1 car in the Grand Prix on the same track.
Czinger has since reclaimed the record, but Hennessey’s remarkable feat served as a fitting teaser for its attempt to beat Bugatti. No record in the world of automotive speed comes with the bragging rights of the fastest production car. If your target customers have more money than they know what to do with, you need to give them something they can’t get anywhere else. Roys admits it’s a “resource-heavy goal,” but he justifies it as a form of advertising. “There’s a strong argument that when we achieve it, that will just increase everything,” he says. “It will be worth eyes and dollars and a lot of quantifiable gain.”
So far, the fastest anyone has driven the F5 is 272 mph, back in early 2022. On paper, the car’s design should make it capable of 311 mph or more—but that might not be enough for the record. SSC North America, a Washington State company, made a run in 2020 that appeared on video to average 316 mph, but that was debunked by internet sleuths; it could try again. Bugatti, whose Chiron record hasn’t been sanctioned by Guinness because it didn’t go both directions on the track, could make another attempt. And then there’s Koenigsegg, a boutique Swedish carmaker whose 2017 run at 278 mph is considered by some to be the current official record. That company’s founder and namesake, Christian von Koenigsegg, claims his new Jesko Absolut model, a twin-turbo V-8, is capable of reaching 330 miles per hour, and he wants to prove it before the end of the year.
“If somebody else goes out and goes faster, God bless ’em,” Hennessey says, but he fully expects to hit 311 mph. “We tell our prospective F5 buyers, ‘You’re not just buying a car. You’re buying an experience, and you’re buying a piece of history.’ ” In any case, he’s already looking past the record attempt. He plans to build 99 F5s and then move on to the next car, with a more comfortable ride, room for a suitcase—and cup holders. It’s going to have half the horsepower of the F5 and a manual stick shift and be more of what Hennessey calls a “driver’s car.” The company’s design director, Nathan Malinick, keeps sketches for what’s called Project Overlord tightly under wraps, but he sees it as key to the future of the company, telling me, “We’re in the beginning stages of building America’s Ferrari.”
Three years ago, thinking about the automotive industry’s move away from gas-powered engines, Hennessey released sketches of an unconventional new electric vehicle he promised to make, with six wheels and four seats arranged in a diamond pattern. Called Project Deep Space, it promised “private-jet luxury” at a $3 million price tag. The press release touted a 2026 start to production, but Hennessey has since put the project on hold because his customers’ appetite for internal combustion doesn’t show signs of relenting.
The speed records are a great hook, but it’s the visceral feel of driving Hennessey’s cars that everyone in the company discusses as their main appeal. As we pull into the garage from our run down the drag strip, I ask Hennessey if I can take the F5 for a spin to capture the full experience—though I expect him to explain the 2.7 million reasons why not.
“Yeah,” he says easily. “You want to drive it right now?”
We pop the butterfly doors up and out, almost as if we’re in that Countach from my childhood wall, and walk around the car’s impossibly long, low curves to switch seats. After I lower myself behind the U-shaped steering wheel—which looks more like an airplane yoke and contains most of the car’s controls in a handful of buttons within thumb reach—I hit the ignition and reverse out of the garage more slowly and carefully than I’ve ever driven. On the single-lane loop of track that leads to the drag strip, I can feel every bump in the road. Hennessey advises me to get a feel for the brakes, which require more pressure than those in a normal car.
As we round the final bend onto the straightaway, he tells me to shift into third gear. “Okay, give it some throttle,” he says. I can feel violent explosions as I press the pedal to the floor and the car blasts forward. “No, give it a little more,” he says when I hit triple digits and start to let up. He can’t help himself.
This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Quest to Build the World’s Fastest Car.” Subscribe today.
