Are you tired of hauling your glorious state flags of Texas around at a meager 100 or 150 MPH? Of course you are — who wouldn't be? Well, you have reason to be delighted, since the good folks at Hennessey have just run their supercharged HPE700 Mustang at an alarming 195 MPH.
Personally, for my flag-transportation needs, I can't even consider anything below 200 MPH, but I'm certain for most people loping along at 195 MPH will prove satisfactory. Here's what Hennessey had to say about the speed test, from their press release:
Recently, the Hennessey team wanted to test their 717 horsepower HPE700 Supercharged Mustang development car (John's personal car and occasional daily driver) beyond the 130+ mph speeds that they have seen on the dragstrip. "Thankfully, we had recently received an invitation from the guys at the Continental Tires proving grounds in Uvalde to come over and do some testing on their 8.0 mile high speed oval", said Hennessey. "So we rounded up a team of our technicians and engineers and made a quick road trip to Uvalde to see how our HPE700 would perform at higher speeds".
John and his son, JP, drove the HPE700 Mustang from the company's Sealy headquarters to Uvalde - a distance of 240 miles. After spending the night, the team arrived at the proving grounds early the next morning. After waiting for several hours for the morning dew to burn off the track, the team prepped the car to go out and take a few laps around the large oval. "It's almost like a big circle with two short 1.1 mile long straightaways", said John.
After completing a warm up lap Hennessey decided to open up the HPE700's supercharged 5.0L Coyote V8 engine and see how the car felt at higher speeds. "Cruising through the final turn I was trying to maintain 120-130 mph while building some speed as I neared the straight", said Hennessey. When I hit the straight, I wanted to be around 140 mph and then let all of the Mustang's horsepower run wide open. The car pulled very strong and just kept pulling. I hit a pretty nasty bump around 170 mph and kept my foot on the gas. Then I hit the rev limiter at just over 195 mph according to the Racelogic VBox display".
After returning to the pits, Racelogic engineer, Joe Lachovsky was able to confirm that the 2015 HPE700 Supercharged Mustang had recorded a top speed of 195.2 mph as validated by the VBox 3i GPS-based data logging system.
The cost for the HPE700 as tested is $65,874, which is probably among the cheapest ways to hit nearly 200 MPH in almost anything. Hell, even jumping out of an airplane only gets you up to about 120 MPH.