Hennessey’s New 1,817 HP Roadster Is the Most Powerful Manual-Transmission Hypercar Ever, the Tuner Says

Hennessey Special Vehicles recently made news with a record-setting half-mile run in the Venom F5 hypercar, as test driver David Donohue hit a top speed of 221.92 mph in just 2,640 feet of runway at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Today, however, Hennessey has revealed perhaps equally surprising information, which is that the Texas-based company plans to build a limited run of the Venom F5 equipped with a six-speed manual transmission.

Not only is Hennessey touting the model variant as “the world’s most powerful manual,” but the 12 examples built will all be based on a convertible layout. As the new Venom F5-M Roadster will be powered by the same 1,817 hp, twin-turbocharged 6.6-liter “Fury” engine as the original Venom F5, the open-top configuration should help drivers listen to the roaring power plant all the better as they row through the gears themselves.

“We always wanted to build a manual Venom F5—and it’s something our clients have been asking for. It’s old school, it’s badass, and it offers ultimate driving engagement,” stated John Hennessey, the boutique marque’s founder and CEO, in the official news release.

The announcement harks back to Hennessey’s Venom GT Roadster, which was based on a Lotus chassis and was also equipped with a manual transmission. That car logged a 265.6 mph run in 2016. The F5, by contrast, is a ground-up build completely original to Hennessey.

“The Venom F5 is the only thing that we’ve ever built that was like a clean sheet of paper,” Hennessey told Robb Report in 2020, when he had just debuted the production version of the coupe. “We took everything that we knew and liked from the previous 29 years and tried to put the best of all of our know-how in the all-new car.” In the four subsequent years, Hennessey and his team have developed the open-top version of the Venom F5, as well as the track-focused Venom F5 Revolution.

For the F5-M Roadster, the decision was made to use a gated shifter rather than the more traditional upholstered boot on the GT. Converting the F5 to manual required a remap of the engine’s output, while also necessitating a redesign of the center console that resulted in moving the climate controls and window switches lower in the cockpit. 

From the exterior, each F5-M will be easily identifiable thanks to a 55-inch dorsal fin that extends from the rear of the intake scoop on the roof. Exposed carbon fiber and a defining livery further accentuate the unique nature of each F5-M. Hennessey follows hot on the heels of the Pagani Utopia, another stunning hypercar offered with a stick shift (optional). But the Utopia puts down 851 hp, less than half the output that Hennessey promises. 

With every example comes the choice of a signature color for the exterior, one that Hennessey then removes from its online configurator when selected. Of course, even at the time of the public reveal, Hennessey confirmed that each of the 12 planned units has been sold at a starting price of $2.65 million.

The dozen F5-M will count toward the 30-unit production cap for the F5 Roadster in total. Hennessey is still accepting applications for remaining allocations of the other F5 variants, though, but there’s no word as to whether any of them will receive a manual transmission.

Click below for more photos of the Hennessey Venom F5-M Roadster.