Hennessey Venom F5
Why 3.2: A pushrod 6.6-litre twin-turbo V8 making 1,817 hp, sent to the rear wheels alone, in a 1,385 kg carbon car with a single-clutch gearbox. Twenty-four coupes at $2.1 million, sold out in 2021 — and unusually for this price bracket, Hennessey keeps organising events where owners actually use them.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
The Fury is a 6.6-litre pushrod eight that somehow pulls to 8,000 rpm, so it hammers with a low-end depth no flat-plane exotic reaches, through a short side exit and essentially no insulation. But two enormous turbochargers swallow the top end, and what arrives up there is boost rather than bark. Violent rather than tuneful.
8-cylinder · turbocharged · 8,000 rpm redline · rated 7.4 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €1.9M (2021) → €2.6M (2026), trending up · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
There aren't any — strict two-seater.
The only position there is, so makers of this era equip it: expect a passenger-airbag cut-off (key switch or occupant sensing) as standard, because there is no rear row to point children to. Whether the seat itself carries ISOFIX anchors is maker-specific — Porsche bundles them with its child-seat preparation, Ferrari sold them as an option, others are belt-mount only with the airbag off.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The Fury engine is the reason to take this seriously. Hennessey did not buy a V8 and turn the boost up; it commissioned a bespoke 6.6-litre block that keeps pushrods and two valves per cylinder — an architecture everyone else abandoned — and then made it rev to 8,000 rpm and produce 1,817 hp. That combination should not work and it does. What follows is the ownership story, and it is better than the rest of this shelf. Hennessey is a tuning company before it is a manufacturer, its customer base is American and hands-on, and the company runs high-speed testing and owner outings as a matter of marketing routine, including the verified half-mile record run in 2024. Venom F5s get driven at speed, in public, on purpose. They are also twenty-four cars at over two million dollars from a marque whose entire pitch is a number nobody has independently confirmed at the top end, and values have crept up rather than down. So the miles are real but few, and the flip pressure is moderate rather than absent. Mid-table for a hypercar, which on this Index is a compliment.