Hennessey Super Venom Ford Mustang review – can a Mustang handle 850bhp?

Through the blue haze of tyre smoke a pair of squiggly lines lead all the way back from where I am to where I started. It’s like the man upstairs has scrawled the sun-bleached road with a Sharpie. And then set fire to it.

It was only meant to be a quick rolling burnout for Aston Parrott to shoot, but once the wheels start spinning and the Mustang launches off the line it becomes more of a quest. One to see how many gears I can pull before the Hennessey Super Venom Mustang finds traction. In the end I run out of resolve before the supercharged V8 runs out of grunt.

Heavily tuned muscle cars might not be woven into the fabric of UK and European car culture, but their appeal is hard to deny. Especially when you’re talking about a car based on the Mustang Dark Horse – a model we rate highly. Endowed with a 70 per cent power increase and a 63 per cent gain in torque, along with a suite of aero, styling and interior trim upgrades, this mega-Mustang wears its fangtastic model name with pride.

If you read last month’s evo, it won’t have escaped your notice that Ford has its own highly tuned Mustang, the GTD, which Ford Racing and Multimatic have thrown the kitchen sink at in order to fight with Porsche’s 992 GT3 RS on home turf. The approaches couldn’t be more different, the Super Venom pursuing the classic tuner route of making more of what the stock car has, the GTD applying motorsport technology – with a price tag to match – to reinvent the car from nose to tail. Whichever way you slice it, 2025 is an unexpectedly great time to be a muscle car fan.

Like all of Hennessey’s showroom-based models, the Super Venom begins life as a stock Mustang (upgrades can be applied to a Dark Horse or a regular Mustang GT). A recent deal with Ford means that, in addition to dealing directly with Hennessey, customers can order a Super Venom from authorised Ford dealerships. The base car is then sent directly from Ford’s Flat Rock Assembly plant in Michigan to Hennessey’s Texas HQ for conversion, before the finished product is delivered to the customer as a brand-new vehicle.

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The raw stats are compelling. Power is up from 500bhp for a standard US-market Dark Horse (447bhp in the UK and Europe) to a monstrous 850bhp at 7250rpm. Torque also climbs like an F‑35 on afterburners, from 418lb ft at 4900rpm (398lb ft in the UK and Europe) to 650lb ft at the same revs. Interestingly, Ford Performance Parts also offers a supercharger upgrade for the 5-litre ‘Coyote’ V8, but this stops 40bhp shy of Hennessey’s engine build. Confusingly, the Mustang GTD uses a dry-sumped development of the previous-generation 5.2-litre supercharged ‘Predator’ V8. At 815bhp this is also slightly less powerful than Hennessey’s motor, but it revs a little higher and trumps it for torque with a peak of 664lb ft.

As you might imagine, sticking top-tier supercar power into a Mustang makes the rear-drive coupe a rocketship in a straight line. This test car – Hennessey’s development vehicle – is fitted with the ten-speed automatic transmission, which makes it slightly heavier than if it were equipped with the six-speed stick-shift, but quicker against the clock.

Comparing stock with tuned, the factory ten-speed US Dark Horse runs from 0 to 60mph in 3.7sec (the clock starting after a drag racing-style 1ft ‘rollout’, as is the American norm) while the Super Venom does it in 3.2sec. Moving to the standing quarter-mile, the standard Dark Horse runs 12sec at 118.4mph where the Super Venom drops that to 10.9sec at 133mph. That’s shifting for an 1800+ kg rear-drive car.

Visually the Super Venom has morphed into something more overt than the regular GT or Dark Horse, with enough of an aero package to suggest track work is now within this Mustang’s skill set, but not so extreme as to expect 911 GT3 RS (or indeed Mustang GTD) levels of circuit capability.

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This prototype is based on a Dark Horse, so there are no chassis or brake upgrades. Nor are there any changes to the gearbox or engine internals. It’s all in line with Hennessey’s policy of augmenting the standard hardware and remapping the software rather than messing with internals. It’s also testament to Ford’s ‘Built Tough’ motto, which is why this highly tuned car still carries the factory warranty, backed up by Hennessey’s own three-year, 36,000-mile cover.

In the US a Super Venom Dark Horse costs $163,950, with a regular GT-based Super Venom costing $149,950. For reference, that’s similar money to a BMW M4 CS. Production will be limited to just 91 cars, a number chosen to commemorate the year John Hennessey founded his business – 1991 – and marked by the Super Venom’s special ’91 Icon’ livery.

As you’d imagine it’s a riot to drive. Not raw and unruly, but definitely rowdy. The engine sounds wild to ears deprived by ever-quieter European-market silencing, the Coyote V8’s rich cross-plane holler mixed with a caustic whine from the Whipple supercharger. There’s amusement on the overrun, too, with plenty of authentic crackles and rumbles.

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We’ve had a mixed time of things with the regular Dark Horse Mustang, loving the six-speed stick shift but having reservations about the ten-speed auto, especially when fitted to a Euro-spec car, which has those 53bhp and 20lb ft deficits, and runs with OPFs in the exhaust system that restrict its vocal chords. All I can say is that 850bhp and 650lb ft certainly give the ten-speed Dark Horse the giddy-up, but I’d still rather have the six-speed manual.

We take the Super Venom into Texas Hill Country. The roads are b-i-i-i-i-g, with long straights and fabulous fast sweepers, but also some nice twists and turns. There’s hardly anyone around and the roads are so well sighted you can enjoy a fast driver’s car as its maker intended. Unsurprisingly the Mustang feels totally at home.

It rides and steers with the same composure and clean response as impressed us about the regular Dark Horse on earlier drives. The massive hike in power and torque doesn’t seem to overwhelm the chassis or the firm Brembo brakes, and the electronics cope well, so you’re not constantly butting into the stability or traction systems. It’s a hefty thing to hustle, but the straightforward challenge of making a very powerful front-engined rear-drive coupe go well along a great road is a big part of its appeal.   

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There’s an endless sense of go. That’s partly due to the ten-speed gearbox, which has you pulling a handful of upshifts before it finds the loping stride you’d expect from a big V8 in the fourth- to seventh-gear range, but mostly it’s due to the fact you’re being fired towards the distant horizon by eight hundred and fifty horsepower.

As thrilling as it is, the real achievement with the Super Venom is it would still happily serve as your daily driver. That might sound absurd for a car that returns low double-digit mpg figures when you’re on it, but spend time in Texas – especially the oil-rich Houston area, where gasoline is around £2 a gallon – and you’ll realise why ultra-muscle cars (and highly tuned Raptor and Ram pickups) are so popular.

Ford’s radical Marvel-spec GTD takes the Mustang into formidable new territory, but the less extreme Super Venom serves to remind us of the Mustang’s unreconstructed muscle car magic. Horses for courses, you might say.