Charles Murray, Senior Technical Editor, Electronics & Test
The world record for a two-seat sports car tumbled last month, as a Hennessey Venom GT hit a max speed of 270 mph.
Engineers clocked the 1,244-HP supercar using an electronic data acquisition system on a 3.2-mile landing runway for the Space Shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (See the amazing video here.) Hennessey Performance engineers said that the car could have gone faster if it hadn’t run out of runway.
”If you look at the car’s acceleration curve, it was obviously getting shallower at that high speed, but we believe we could have done maybe 275 (mph),” Doug Kott, spokesman for Hennessey, told Design News. The record run was made over a distance of 2.4 miles, which allowed the Venom just 0.8 miles stopping distance.
The Venom GT is powered by a 90-degree V-8 engine that produces 1,244 HP at 6,600 rpm and 1,155 lb-ft of torque at 4,400 rpm. The car is known for its 0-60 mph time of 2.7 seconds.
|