850-horsepower Hennessey Mustang Dark Horse to compete with BMW M8

Both cars can run a quarter mile in under 11 seconds, but there is a clear winner in these races.

The BMW M8 Competition is a beast with its 4.0-liter twin-turbocharged V8 engine that produces 617 horsepower, but can it accomplish the seemingly impossible and keep up with the Hennessey-tuned Ford Mustang Dark Horse, which has 233 more horsepower?

Just a few months after the American tuner unveiled its souped-up Mustang Dark Horse, it’s now taking the extraordinary little car, the M8 Competition, to a series of races. We’re not sure why it decided to test this car alongside the BMW when it’s clearly at a power disadvantage, but it certainly made for an interesting test between American and German muscle cars.

Read: Hennessey supercharges Mustang Dark Horse to 850 hp

To significantly increase the performance of the Mustang Dark Horse, Hennessey added a supercharger, a new fuel pump and upgraded fuel injectors to the 5.0-liter V8 engine. Together with the high-flow air induction system and engine tuning, the car delivers 850 horsepower and 650 pound-feet (880 Newton-meters) of torque, a significant increase of 350 horsepower and 232 pound-feet (314 Newton-meters) over the standard model.

Hennessey says that thanks to the upgrades, the pony car will accelerate to 60 mph (96 km/h) in just 3.2 seconds and will run the quarter mile in 10.9 seconds at 133 mph (214 km/h). BMW also claims that the M8 Competition can accelerate to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds, although some independent tests have recorded acceleration times in the 2-second range and quarter-mile times in the 11-second range.

In the first race, the M8 Competition’s all-wheel-drive traction helped it get ahead of the Mustang on the starting line. As speed increased and the Hennessey car began to accelerate, it easily passed the BMW.

The second race started strong. The BMW again had a slight advantage, but the German engineers’ skill could not prevent the finely tuned Ford from overtaking it at the finish line.