Monterey Car Week starts in eight days, which means that car people everywhere are about to be overwhelmed by bespoke, low-number hypercars and supercars. While many of us enjoy performance cars, there’s something about modern ones that can sometimes feel anodyne, derivative; all specs and no heart.
And then there’s the Hennessey Blackbird, so named for the iconic high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. If you’re a Hennessey hater, I regret to inform you that it looks very, very, very cool.
Much like the Lockheed aircraft that lends it a name, the Blackbird’s refreshingly off-kilter design and clever details have allowed it to outrun the possible threats to it caused by my jaded autojournalist cynicism. Further evasion is provided by a real, honest-to-goodness six-speed manual, a naturally-aspirated V8, and a lack of screens.
Look At Those Round Fenders
With the Venom GT, Hennessey demonstrated it could build something that was more than just a faster Viper or Cadillac (or Ford Probe). With the Venom F5, the Texas-based company helmed by John Hennessey showed his team could pull enough partners to create something almost entirely from the ground up that could compete with the world’s fastest cars.
Those were both attractive, streched-out hypercars, though neither of them felt like they were particularly avant-garde in terms of design. There’s something about the Blackbird, though, that feels a little more unique and forward-thinking. Inspired by the SR-71, the surfaces are almost organic in execution.
Everything in modern exotics seems like it’s been reduced to the absolute limit of what material science will allow in order to achieve extreme aerodynamics. There’s a lot going on here, and I’m not even sure it all works as individual elements, but together it creates something that feels discernibly differentiated from other cars out there.
While not as long and slender as the SR-71, the massive rear flanks pull off the same trick of letting the viewer know that the power here resides aft of the cockpit. Just as a bit of comparison, here’s what the SR-71 looks like in profile:
The most obvious callout to the SR-71 are the stabilizers in the rear, which deploy at 71 mph and sit at a 71-degree angle. Get it? It’s 71 degrees. Here’s what it looks like in action:
That’s such a silly, unnecessary choice. More supercars need silly and completely unnecessary choices. Part of me wonders if the designers of modern McLarens won’t look at this car and think to themselves, They made a fun supercar, I wasn’t aware that was something a person could do!
“Beauty is not a byproduct, it must be intentional. With Blackbird, every decision our team made, inside and out, was guided by our vision to create the ultimate touring hypercar: one that strikes a perfect balance between elegance and aggression, beauty and purpose, inspiring people to fall in love at first sight,” said Hennessey Design Director Nathan Malinick.
I’ll be damned if they didn’t do it.
The Interior Might Be Even Better
I am a Texan, though I did not find my home on the range. I’m not even an all-hat, no-cattle Texan. I’m a no-hat, no-cattle Texan (unless you count my Astros ballcap). I see this photo, though, and think: Maybe I should get a Stetson? I think I could pull it off. I still say y’all.
This is a “GT” and not a pure sports car, I suppose, and the goal here is feel and not just fast. The word Hennessey uses is “analog,” and the idea is that it should be extremely fun to drive and comfortable for 800 miles every day (or, about six hours in something this fast).
While this isn’t going to fit your whole family, there’s enough luggage space for two full-size carry-on bags, four cupholders, and a lot more room than its F5 sibling.
We’ll I’ll be dipped like a Dilly Bar, that looks pretty darn good, too. The centerpiece is the gated six-speed transmission. To the automaker’s credit, this is a hallmark of all of the cars in this series, so it’s not a surprise. It does look good, though.
The rest of the floating binnacles are sort of the bare minimum, with the tach dead-center (the speedometer does appear to be some sort of screen, and this might help with the mandatory rear-camera requirement):
People do still want to hear their navigation/music and likely see a screen for that, so how does Hennessey get around this? A “hidden technology” strategy, wherein there’s some sort of “bespoke Hennessey holster” that keeps the device charged and connected to the infotainment. In this way, the Blackbird maybe shares something with the Slate Truck.
It’s Aiming To Be The Highest-Revving NA V8 In Any Road Car
The stacked quad-exhausts definitely give the impression of the GAU-8 Avenger cannon from the A-10 Warthog rather than the SR-71, but it’s still in keeping with the aeronautical theme.
As with other Hennessey vehicles, there’s a 6.2-liter V8 developed by long-time high-performance engine builder Ilmor Engineering. The target is for 800-850 horsepower with a 9,000 RPM redline, which will probably sound hilarious. As with the Venoms, it’s connected only to the rear wheels.
While focused on an “analog” experience, it’s still capable of a run to 60 mph in just 2.6 seconds on the way to a top speed of 220 miles per hour. I think this makes it more of a supercar than a hypercar, though there is one way in which it is a hypercar.
Yeah, It Costs $2.5 Million
If you care about the price, you are not the customer for this car, and there are, per Hennessey, already more than 2/3rds of the 71-total production run spoken for at its debut. Still, $2.5 million is a lot of money to give anyone, and there have been questions about John Hennessey’s behavior in the past (not the bit about him taking an edible and writing a musical, that sounds awesome).
For his part, Hennessey seems to have built multiple Venom GTs and Venom F5s (there are at least three that are going to be for sale at Monterey next week). I have sat in a Venom before, and it was very real.
In some ways, you can see this as a vehicle built with a similar ethos to the Pagani Utopia, which also prioritized the analog over everything else and, in 2022 dollars, cost about $2.2 million.
The biggest difference, though, is I’m not sure how big of a hat you could store in the Pagani.
Top photo: Hennessey
John Hennessey is a thief above all else.
F John Hennessey.
I’m not saying it should happen, but I wouldn’t be upset if I read that he had been curb stomped.
He’s a scamming POS. Nothing he does is serious.
Inspired by a cold war relic that was obsolete almost out of the gate. I guess it fits. For the record, I’ve loved the SR-71 forever and always will.
All I got from this was the word ‘ovipositor’ stuck in my head from the four pics and a GIF of the exhaust end of the car.
and probably 99% of the ones that actually sell will drive at 0 mph and will be strictly decorative in a big garage.
6.2? As in LT by GM? I suppose they have quite a few cores to pick up cheap and properly machine whilst removing the seems to kill them
I think Ilmor uses Callies cranks in their Nascar and marine small blocks – made right down I-75 in Fremont Ohio.
Good article. SUPER intrusive ad for Autopian TV. My Gawd, the intrusion. Covers 1/3 of my screen at all times.
Sounds like you should meet Mr. Firefox and a few of his extensions.
They are doing some backend upgrades to the website, the video player specifically, that is causing all kind of goofy things.
It is super annoying, they brought more Jalops over and then the Jalop problems seemed to double.
No, they made a recent upgrade. This is no Kinja’d.
I marvel that they can find enough buyers for this to offset the R&D/tooling/manufacturing costs for the model. Same with Paganis and other over-a-quarter-million-dollar cars.
I know there are a lot of billionaires around, and more every year, but that many to make a $2.5 million dollar car cost effecting and profitable for the company?
What does the front end look like?
I’ll have to DO A GOOGLE?? Sheesh.
For the lazies:
https://robbreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Hennessey-Blackbird-opener.jpg?w=1024
Called the Blackbird. Paint color featured isn’t “Stealth Coating Black”.
>:(
I haven’t been particularly excited about supercars in a while but this one looks pretty darn cool 🙂
The SR-71 and its siblings are my favorite aircraft. For anyone near NYC who’s interested, it’s worth it to visit the Intrepid on Pier 86 to see the A-12. So freaking cool.
If you’re near DC, it’s definitely worth the trip to Dulles to see the Udvar Hazy center of the Smithsonian air and space museum. They have an SR71 and also a space shuttle.
Cool. I didn’t know they had branches locations. I’ve been to the one in D.C., when I was a youngling.
Serious question: What’s the big deal about a gated shifter? By the looks of it, it is nothing more than a trim plate that the lever is poking through. Granted that the angle of the throws must be small enough and the gate plate close enough to the pivot point in order to not need a large cutout, but the throws should be able to be relatively short whenever the lever arm length from the shift ball down to its pivot point is short. For all I know, the big shifter on my dad’s IH pickup in the 60s that had throws that required most of the mobility range of your shoulder since the rod was probably closer to three feet long than two, might have been able to sport a gate plate if it were down closer to the floor.
Are the walls of the gate opening actually used to constrain the stick? (I doubt it since it would generate sharp burrs.) Is it a proxy signifier for “this shifter is less sloppy than average, therefore it won’t hit these walls”? Does a gated shifter necessarily require some better linkage design? Somebody educate me please.
Your guess is correct, the walls of the gate constrain the stick. There’s a free-spinning sleeve around the stick’s shaft that rolls over the edges of the gate to make it feel smoother, rather than grinding along the gate’s fingers.
That was useful in old race cars because it enabled the manufacturer to tune transmission performance and shifter play/behavior separately. It was simpler than having other redundant mechanisms to prevent the shifter from actuating two forks at once, and helped in endurance races where the synchros and forks could be beat to shit by the end of the event, so with the gates the issue of finding the gears (and especially money-shifting) was mitigated, basically like adding gutter bumpers to a bowling lane: you physically can’t miss the shift, and if you’re struggling to feel it, you can SEE the gate.
It was also handy in early mid-engined cars that needed long, complex linkages that led to vague shifter feeling. But with modern, stiff shift cables/linkages, it’s pretty easy to make a transmission with built-in positive feedback. Any gated shifters that still exist are there for heritage, novelty and styling. They do feel different, though not better, than a standard shifter.
My car has a regular shifter and long cables (mid-engined with a transmission from a FWD car, so the selector nub is way back on the tailcone of the transmission housing), and though it’s a little rubbery and a tiny bit sloppy from the 25-year-old bushings, it’s plenty precise for spirited driving and could be made to feel fantastic by replacing the bushings with ball-joints and bearings (both are on my when-i-get-to-it shopping list)
Meanwhile, my simulator has a Thrustmaster gated shifter, and that system really benefits from the gates. It doesn’t need internal mechanisms to laterally separate the gates, only a cam that makes the stick slot in and out of gear longitudinally, because the gated top plate ensures there’s a fixed path for the stick to travel. It’s simpler and gives more positive feedback than the Logitech shifter I used before, and a common upgrade to Logitech’s units is to add a 3D-printed gate internally.
Article of the day right here
Thank you for taking the time to write up that excellent explanation. Much appreciated.
Anyone relying on the shifter mechanism in the cockpit to detent gear shift calamities has done their gearbox DFMEA wrong.
I strongly suspect every road car “gated shifter” in the last 40 years has been a piece of interior trim only.
Pro tip: if you want the famously satisfying “clack clack” noise of a gated shifter you can just let the ball joints on the ends of your shifter cables get worn.
Modern gates are without a doubt for decoration.
In older systems, I’m sure they still had internal mechanisms to prevent disasters, I shouldn’t have written it in a way that implies they didn’t.
Rather, the gates were an alternative to engineering those fail-safe systems to provide pleasant and clear feedback, especially as they could wear down over time under the fast/hard shifting you’d expect from a race/sports car and lead to poor shifter feel. Metallurgy has come a long way in the past half-century, both in terms of stiffness and wear resistance.
has there been any actual reports of Hennessy completing orders? last i heard (several years ago) people’s cars were several years behind schedule with no eta and there were several lawsuits over non delivery contracts ect. I was pretty surprised to find out this company is still in business because the evidence was pretty damning i’m not sure who would be crazy enough to hand them a ton of cash??
https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/q4rsz5/how_is_hennessey_perfomance_still_in_business/
https://www.jalopnik.com/ex-employees-say-hennessey-is-a-bigger-mess-than-you-ev-1778134112/
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2107521/viper-specialist-john-hennessey-his-cylinder-heads-problems/
https://www.carthrottle.com/post/wgvey5q
Hennessy’s always completed orders. They wouldn’t be in business today if they didn’t. Not all the orders, of course, and not even all the paid-for orders. The worst of it seems to have been in 1998-2002, but there’s some more recent reports as well. Certainly recent enough that I wouldn’t put up any money that it’d hurt me to lose.
That’s a very complicated way to say something that sounds like “pyramid scheme”
Oh my god who even cares about this kind of crap any more. This is rich people porn, a vehicle designed to sit in a climate-controlled cavern until it doubles in value so the owner – who never drove it a single mile – can sell it to the next rich schmuck who will just do the same thing as the previous owner. Sick and tired of this crap; the world burns, everything is too expensive, and yet we’re supposed to ooh and aah at all the neat toys the 0.1% get to have. Screw that.
Since the thief John Hennessey is involved, there is a solid chance that these will never be delivered to the paying customers (or maybe they will be stripped for parts to complete the project of owners who live close enough to cause him physical harm).
Grifter Twunt. Come find me, Mr. Hennessey.
It’s supposed to weigh under 3,000 lbs. That is definiterly captured my interest considering the power on tap.
Think i’ve gotten more cynical these days, but these super limited cars that will never see the road just dont do anything for me anymore. This one really has no purpose. Can’t race it, doesnt have anything advanced tech wise (The AMG 1 having the F1 derived motor is still pretty damn cool)
The blackbird is an icon, but this thing just reminds me of one of the generic supercars from a GTA game.
I think the majority of readers here share the sentiment. I’ve got a laundry list of cars I’d like to interact with/own and it’s relatively small. And not much has been added to it in the past 10 years…
Yeah, in the same boat there. Although i do want to hear the Valkyrie at high revs, just becasue a big v12 at 10k RPM is still pretty nuts.
But where are Spritle and Chim Chim supposed to stow away?
Forced to ride with Racer X.
I do appreciate the hard body line on the door emulating the iconic chines on the Blackbird.
Now take it to Oshkosh and race a plane down the runway.
More info on the engine please! 6.2L, and Ilmor makes me think of a good ‘ole GM LS/LT v8. I know Ilmor uses those for their boat engine program and they are in a 6.2L displacement. Wouldnt be surprised if its just a heavily reworked GM 6.2L (would be smart, honestly). But I know Ilmor also makes the bespoke indy car engines for GM, so it could be something like that too or many other options in between.
Also, I will not comment much here on this car other than I do not like that interior. It seems way too much like a car from the early 2000’s. I dont know what it should look like, but I guess I got tired of this interior design after Pagani and the Zonda crushed it. And I would take a Utopia over this any day (yes I know it also has an interior that I said I dont like, but I would suffer through it for the glory of the Pagani).
The Indycar is a 2.2 liter V6 so I doubt much commonality there. Probably a variant from their Nascar and marine engine programs. The quoted power and rpm are well within that envelope.
Doesn’t Hennessey have a bit of a dodgy reputation? There are a lot of horror stories out there that make him come across as a bit of a conman. I know V10emous has shared a few if he’d like to weigh in.
There’s a link to Torch’s writing about some of them near the end of the post.
It’s been pointed out that the management structure of the company may have changed and JH may not be as directly involved as he was in the days where he would steal customers’ parts and money and then go scream at them on forums when they complained. If so, that is to their credit. I still wouldn’t spend 7 figures on something from Hennessey even if I could.
But the car does seem awesome.
Hennessey would have to personally fund universal daycare to scrub the least crusty shyte from his reputation.
He is an ass polyp.
I lived in Houston during his heyday years of always getting great press in the magazines while at the same time hearing horror stories from people at car meetups who paid him to work on their cars. All the stuff V10omous mentioned still dogs Hennessy’s reputation for a lot of folks in the Houston area, despite the supposed improvements in management practices.
I haven’t lived in Houston for many years, but I’m still annoyed he bought up the dragstrip in Sealy, which used to be my Friday hangout in the late 90s, just to close it to the public.
Am I just a jaded old man now (59 for the record), or does that exhaust look ridiculous? I’m good with either answer.
It’s def ridiculous……and, along with the flaps/spoilers – is amazing
Ridiculous in a good way – in some ways it reminds me of the MV Agusta F4 superbike exhaust setup
I don’t have any particular feelings about it. I guess it’s ok. As far as you being a jaded old man, you don’t get a choice about the old part, and you’re not much older than I am. Jaded is up to you.
Any word on the rebuild interval on an Ilmor with a 9k redline? 6.2L sure sounds like they are modifying the NASCAR truck engine.
Now I’m picturing Jonathan Groff as the CEO of McLaren singing this with a British accent.
Oceans rise, empires fall
It’s much harder when it’s all your call
All alone, across the sea
When your customers say they hate you, don’t come crawling back to me
Maybe it’s because I’ve been rewatching Knight Rider, but I’m getting Super Pursuit Mode vibes here. For the record, that’s not a good thing.
SPM was pretty cheesy but I liked the addition of TC3 in Season 4.
Whenever I try to re-watch my 80s shows, I don’t make it too far.
and all I want is for someone from Kentucky to put a manual transmission in a C8.