Collection Gift Guide: Houston, We have Liftoff
December 1, 2005
2006 Hennessey Venom 1000 Twin Turbo
In the early 1990s, racing enthusiast john Hennessey, a veteran of Bonneville and Pikes Peak, spent most of his time souping up twin-turbo Mitsubishi 3000GTs and Dodge Stealths. So when presented with his first Dodge Viper in 1993, Hennessey made a natural modification: He fed it more air. “It was just another car that came into the shop,” he says. These days, however, no one would accuse Hennessey Performance Engineering’s thoroughly modified Viper of being just another car. “We took something fairly radical and made it even more extreme,” says Hennessey, whose work on the iconic muscle car has contributed mightily to his reputation as a no-holds-barred high-performance tuner.
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(Click image to enlarge.)Take everything you know about the 500 hp hand-built hellion from Detroit’s Connor Avenue Assembly Plant and multiply it by two. Then buckle into Hennessey’s five-point harness and brace yourself. The Venom 1000’s fangs come in the form of twin Garrett turbochargers, which work with an air-to-air intercooler and 15 pounds of boost to develop an astonishing 1,000 hp and 1,100 ft lbs of torque output. That’s more power than the Bugatti Veyron, though Hennessey sees his Viper more as a supercar alternative than a competitor. “A guy with a Veyron or an Enzo
might buy one of my cars to have something different to drive on another day of the week,” he says. “But he wouldn’t sacrifice performance.”
Like the Veyron, the Venom is designed as a road car with racecar capabilities. At 3,430 pounds, each horse only needs to motivate 3.4 pounds of mass. According to Hennessey, the Venom will launch from zero to 60 mph in 2.9 seconds, and he records a zero-to-200 mph time of 20 seconds. Given one mile of straight open road, the Venom will top 210 mph. “We’ve gone over 220 mph in the convertible, but because of the flexible roof, the car grows four to five inches in height,” Hennessey says, “and that affects top speed.” Theoretically, a top speed of 255 mph would be possible in the coupe, if the car could overcome its not-so-slippery .39 drag coefficient. Despite the new Aero Body upgrade, which includes a bulldozer-jawed front air dam, along with a rear diffuser and spoiler, the Viper’s front end is an intrinsically blunt instrument.
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