Hennessey Venom GT

Venom is a strange thing to name a car after, and the Ophidiary wants to be precise about why.

Poison is passive; you have to eat it. Venom is delivered. It requires an apparatus — a hollow tooth, a groove, a duct, a muscle to squeeze the gland — and it requires an animal willing to close the distance. Venom is not a substance. Venom is a substance plus an intention plus a mechanism, and every car in this book is arguably an attempt to build the third part.

John Hennessey, of Sealy, Texas, has spent a career on that third part. The Venom GT took a Lotus Exige chassis — light, mid-engined, British, sensible — stretched it, and installed a 7.0-litre twin-turbocharged pushrod V8 producing figures that started at a thousand horsepower and did not stop there. The donor car’s original engine had four cylinders and made about the same power as a modern diesel estate.

In 2014 a Venom GT ran 270.49 miles per hour on the Space Shuttle landing facility at the Kennedy Space Center. It was not certified as a production car record, because the run was made in one direction only and because Hennessey had not built enough cars to satisfy the definition of “production”. Both objections are correct. Neither one changes what the speedometer said.

There is a serpent-shaped lesson in the certification dispute. Venom is not measured by how it feels. It is measured in LD50 — the dose at which half the test subjects die — and that number is arrived at by protocol, in a laboratory, under conditions that no snake has ever agreed to. The inland taipan holds the record for venom toxicity and has killed nobody, because it lives in the middle of Australia and would rather not. Meanwhile the saw-scaled viper, whose venom is far less potent, kills enormous numbers of people, because it lives where people live and it is short-tempered.

The Venom GT is an inland taipan: a laboratory number of extraordinary magnitude, produced in tiny quantities, encountered by almost nobody.