Hennessey Venom GT is world's fastest car at 270.49 mph

Hennessey has done it again, improving the claimed record-holding top speed of its Venom GT to 270.49 miles per hour. The record run was made on February 14 on the 3.22-mile landing runway at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The speed was confirmed by a Racelogic Vbox telemetry system, but for a variety of reasons, it will not make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. However, it narrowly beat out the record-holding top speed of the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport at 267.81 mph.

Amazingly, the 1,244-horsepower Venom GT was still accelerating even as it reached 270 mph, but the length of the runway limited how far the coupe could be pushed. Driver Brian Smith only had about 2.6 miles to complete his run because it took nearly a kilometer (0.62 miles) to slow the car to 70 mph. "It was still pulling. If we could run on an eight-mile oval, we could go faster than that," said Smith to Top Gear.




Even if the hypercar had gone faster, Guinness would not have certified it as a record. To qualify, a car must complete two runs in opposite directions with the average speed serving as the record time. The Venom was only able to complete one because that is all NASA would allow, and even that took two years of negotiations according to founder John Hennessey. It still wouldn't matter, though, because Guinness now stipulates that 30 examples are required to certify a car as a "production vehicle." Hennessey is only building 29 Venoms and has sold 11.

Still, the Venom GT is already Guinness-certified as the world's quickest car to 300 kilometers per hour (186 mph) at 13.63 seconds, and the company says that its next goal is to begin setting lap records with it at tracks around the world.