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Hennessey Venom GT Is Fastest Sports Car Ever

By John Dodge

CHICAGO (CBS) -- It's the fastest darn sports car ever.

As Chicago car fans began kicking the tires at the Chicago Auto Show, a new land speed record for a sports car was broken on a landing strip at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Using the landing runway for the Space Shuttle, the Hennessey Venom GT brought the record back to the United States reaching a top speed of 270.49 miles per hour on Feb 14.

Hennessey officially announced the record on Monday. The old record of 269.86 was held by Bugatti's Veyron Super Sport.

The car was still accelerating when it reached 270 miles per hour, according to engineers on hand to verify the car's speed. However, the driver was running out of room on the 3.2 mile strip and had to slow down.

The Venom GT also set a record for fastest from 0-200 miles per hour (14.5 seconds).

The car has a 7.0-liter twin turbo V8 engine.

"It was still pulling," said driver Brian Smith after the record run. "If we could run on an 8-mile oval we could go faster than that"

To date, Hennessey has built and delivered eleven Venom GTs to owners around the world.

Each vehicle is built to order and takes six months to complete, the company said in a news release.

The production run will be limited to a total of just 29 units worldwide, making the Venom GT is not only the fastest but also one of the most exclusive hypercars ever produced. The MSRP on the car is upwards of about $1 million.

Hennessey is based outside of Houston and also has a facility in Southern California.

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