Watch the Hennessey Venom F5 fly past 250mph

The Hennessey Venom F5 has passed the latest milestone in its quest to be the world’s fastest production car, passing 250mph in testing.

The American car tuning firm was keen to stress that this was not a specific high speed test, with the car achieving the latest record while engineers checked high-speed stability and vehicle dynamics.

In video footage from testing at the Johnny Bohmer Proving Grounds in Florida, the driver is asked if they’ve tried the car in F5 mode, which unlocks full power. When they say no, they’re asked to give it a try.

The Venom F5 is then seen accelerating rapidly down the runway, while a camera at the rear shows flames spit from the exhaust every time the vehicle upshifts.

Once the run is completed, the driver says: “That extra power is nice!”

While Hennessey is best-known for tuning existing cars for more performance, the Venom F5 is a hypercar built by the firm from the ground up.

The firm says its customers ‘love speed’ so it was motivated to build the world’s fastest production car. It uses a 6.6-litre twin-turbocharged V8 engine that makes an astonishing 1,792bhp in a car that weighs less than 1.4 tonnes.

The Venom F5 aims to break through 311mph (500kph), which would make it comfortably the fastest production car ever – the gearbox ratio gives a theoretical top speed of 334mph.

Hennessey says the record attempt will be made using traditional measurements for high-speed runs, with speed measured in two directions using GPS-verified data.

The F5’s predecessor, the Hennessey Venom GT, achieved a top speed of 270mph on the Kennedy Space Centre’s Shuttle Landing Facility runway in 2014.