So you think you know the Hennessey Venom GT?

Plenty of people do, apparently. At least that’s the impression you get if you delve through forum posts or YouTube comments on the subject. Sift through the piles of cyber detritus and the collective ‘expert’ sentiment is that it’s little more than a stretched Lotus Exige with a big Yank V8; a bastardised ‘bitsa’ that excels in a straight line, but sucks around corners. Isn’t it amazing what you can learn from playing Forza Motorsport before your mum sends you to bed?

Call us old-fashioned, but at evo we prefer to actually drive a car before expressing an opinion. Frustratingly that’s always been a problem with the Venom GT, for while Europe’s pre-eminent hypercar makers Bugatti, Pagani, and Koenigsegg are but a short-haul flight away, and friendly owners of Veyrons, Huayras and Ageras are on evo’s office speed dial, Hennessey are based in Sealy, Texas, and there are currently only eight Venom GTs in existence.

So you can imagine our excitement when John Hennessey called to ask if we fancied witnessing the Venom GT make an attempt on the 0-300kph (0-186mph) Guinness World Record for street-legal production cars. When he added we could drive it on a smooth 1.6-mile military runway and then on quiet Texan country roads, we had three flights to Houston booked before he put down the phone.

The story of how the Venom GT came to be is brilliantly bold and refreshingly simple. Having spent the best part of 20 years making Chrysler Vipers go obscenely fast, culminating in a Veyron-trouncing test conducted by respected US magazine Road & Track in 2007, Hennessey got to thinking what could be achieved if he slotted his twin-turbo Viper powertrain into a truly light mid-engined platform. After joking he should put the motor in a Lotus Exige, one thing led to another and the in-house design team produced a rendering of what the car might look like. Hennessey liked what he saw. The itch was about to be scratched.