Hennessey's Venom GT Shared An Engine With Corvette's Z06 – So Why Did They Drive So Different? Change Site

Hennessey Performance Engineering, based in Sealy, Texas, is a tuning company that's known for its work on various American performance cars. The company started out in the 90s, with one of its first and most prominent offering being an upgrade package for the second generation Dodge Viper GTS that boosted power up to 650 hp. In the early 2010s, however, Hennessey would enter the supercar scene with its own vehicle. 

In what can only be described as a Frankenstein project, the Hennessey Venom GT was based on an elongated Lotus Elise chassis, and it also used an elongated and widened Exige body with several notable changes. Instead of the Toyota-sourced four banger in the back, Hennessey opted for a 7.0-liter LS7 V8 from GM, one of the best engines ever made, a similar unit as in the C6 Chevrolet Corvette Z06, but with the addition of twin turbos and various other components. The GT would be succeeded by the fully in-house developed Venom F5, but we're focusing on the original here.

So, the same powertrain as a Corvette, and yet both cars have a completely different driving experience. Why is that? They're built to do completely different things.

For starters, the LS7 V8 in the Z06 is naturally aspirated, and it puts out a minuscule 505 horsepower when compared to the Venom GT. The Corvette also has its fair share of creature comforts, and it's designed to be usable both on the road and on the track. The Venom GT, however, is a totally different story — from the start, it was designed to go fast and be good on the race track. 

Jim Campisano of Motor Trend put it bluntly in his period review of the Z06: "After five days, all I could say was, 'Make mine black.' It was love at first burnout," adding that the drive towards the track was surprisingly enjoyable thanks to the driving position and surprisingly supple ride.

Meanwhile, the Venom GT is much the opposite. The donor Lotus Exige, a sister car to the Elise, is not exactly a luxury sedan, with a completely stripped out interior and very little in the way of creature comforts. With up to 1,451 hp in its most powerful variants, the Venom GT was created exclusively to conquer the relentless quest for speed, which it did. It achieved 270.49 mph in a single-direction run in early 2014 at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This speed was independently verified by Racelogic, and it could have set a Guinness World Record, although that didn't happen due to Guinness' rules at the time.

As Douglas Kott of Road & Track put it in his 2010 road test of the Venom GT, "And if those ominous rotors set on Journalist Frappé didn't put me into sensory overload, the Venom GT's raw acceleration does–a savage burst of cheek-smooshing, gut-compressing, momentarily brain-addling force, the strongest I've ever experienced in a road-going car."