John Hennessey founded Hennessey Performance Engineering in Sealy, Texas in 1991 as a high-performance tuning operation before designing the Venom GT from 2010 as a bespoke hypercar using the Lotus Exige platform as a starting point. The Venom GT stretched the Exige's aluminium tub by 107mm and fitted a 7.0-litre General Motors LS7 V8 block bored and stroked to 7.0 litres with twin Garrett turbochargers producing 1,244 horsepower at maximum tune — a figure achieved in a vehicle that weighed 1,244 kilograms, giving it precisely 1 HP per kilogram. In February 2014 a Venom GT set a one-way top speed of 435.31 km/h (270.49 mph) at the Kennedy Space Center runway in Florida, the fastest measured speed by a production vehicle to that date. Heritage Icons renders all four simultaneous views inside a blue hexagon because the Venom GT exists on the boundary between road car and record holder, and the four-view engineering plate is the only format that respects both identities.