Hennessey, the Houston-area automotive performance firm made up of speed-minded obsessives, took the wraps off the production version of its own supercar back in late 2020. The Venom F5, an F1-inspired road-legal racer with a 1,817-horsepower engine and a price tag of $2.1 million, was revealed in hard-top form as a 24-example limited production run collectible. It had been a long run from drawing board to production; the Venom F5 was introduced by the company in 2014, three years before it spun off its native supercar R&D division, Hennessey Special Vehicles.

But the 24-example hard top wasn’t the end of the road for the Venom F5. And, about two years after the production version emerged, into sight at Monterey’s Car Week cruised a variant of the supercar with an optional top: the Venom F5 Roadster. The Targa version of the Venom F5 packs the same 6.6L V8 biturbo as its closed-top sibling, and performance numbers that are as arresting; the Roaster is, Hennessey assures us, the fastest open-top car going.

The horsepower rating of the Roadster matches that of the hard-top Venom F5. It likely will lose a stopwatch notch or two when the top is off — the hard-top F5 could hit 224 MPH in 15.5 seconds, and 311 before it was through — but not much.

The Venom F5 Roadster will, however, be a trifle pricier: its base sticker reads $3 million. Hennessey is planning to build 30 examples.