Hennessey Super Venom Mustang

Can a standard Mustang Dark Horse chassis handle a power hike to 850bhp? Incredibly, the answer is yes

- by RICHARD MEADEN PHOTOGRAPHY by ASTON PARROTT

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.