Hennessy

Although plenty of us won’t get a chance to plough down the Nürburgring or get behind the wheel of a hypercar in our lifetimes, it’s hard to deny our obsession with all things high-performance. The human race has spent decades perfecting 0-100km/h sprint times and figuring out how to generate maximum outputs with minimal weight. As we embark on a new decade of development, it’s safe to say the quest for perfection is far from over.

The Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk was hardly what you'd call meek, but tuning specialist Hennessey has revealed its version of the Hellcat-powered SUV, complete with a massive 1000 horsepower (745kW).

Hennessey Performance has picked up the gauntlet laid down by the Dodge Demon, outrunning the factory-fresh Fiat Chrysler dragster in a Camaro called 'The Exorcist'. Based on a Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, The Exorcist has been boosted to 756kW and 1197Nm. The results are predictably impressive. The hotted-up Chevy ran a 2.1-second 0-60mph (0-97km/h) sprint, pulled to 100mph (161km/h) in 4.7 seconds and ran the quarter mile in 9.57 seconds at 236km/h.

The Hennessey Venom GT has set a new world record to become the quickest street-legal production car ever to make the dash from 0-300km/h. With Guinness World Records officials and VBox timing specialists on hand, the Venom GT set an official time of 13.63 seconds for the stratospheric sprint – the average of two runs completed in opposite directions along the runway at Ellington Airport in Texas (the first 13.18sec with a 6.5km/h tailwind, the second 14.08sec with a 9.7km/h headwind).