Fire in the Belly

Reeves Callaway is not your basic auto mogul. Were he to some how appear in the corporate board rooms of, say, General Motors or Chrysler, real moguls such as Roger Smith or Lee Iacocca would have him thrown into the street. After all, would they want a 41-yearold former art major from Amherst College who builds 200-miles-per-hour hot-rod Corvettes telling them how to manufacture more ambulatory blister packs for the proletariat? Callaway is an elitist. And there is no room for elitism in the egalitarian world of big-bucks auto marketing. Volume is a word Callaway reserves for his stereo. Automobiles are to be built one by one, with a jeweler's devotion to detail, and then driven at speeds that would make your mother faint. Consider this: (continued on page 158)Fire in the Belly(continued from page 108) The Callaway Corvette, featuring a specially converted 350-cubic-inch, twin-turbocharged L-98 Chevrolet V8 "small block," developing 382 horsepower, and a carefully tuned suspension, will accelerate from 0 to 60 in 4.6 seconds, run the quarter mile in 13 seconds and howl down the interstate at a top speed of 191 mph. Better yet, at 70 mph, it will stop in 170 feet and generate 0.91 g force on the skid pad--a number barely obtainable by many purebred race cars. When measured in the five basic categories of performance--acceleration, top speed, quarter mile, road holding and braking-the Callaway Corvette outmuscles such fabled marques as the Ferrari Testarossa, the Lamborghini Countach and the Porsche 911 Turbo. There is no other production automobile in the world, with the possible exception of the Ferrari F40 (whichis a stark, ultralight, quasi race car costing almost four times as much--$220,000 vs. $60,000), to equal it.

The Callaway Corvette is actually a carefully engineered enhancement of the fiberglass flier that is the darling of every red-blooded male from Newark to San Jose. The vehicle is manufactured, like all Corvettes, at Chevrolet's Bowling Green, Kentucky, plant, then shipped to Callaway's space-age facility in Old Lyme, Connecticut, for modification. Since the carwas introduced in 1986, more than 300 of the exquisite beasts have been built for customers here and in Europe, including Don Johnson--who apparently found the white Testarossa he wheels on Miami Vice a bit tepid for his taste.

When I pulled up in front of Callaway's shop, there was no mistaking it. The rakish one-story building was sheathed in glistening anodized aluminum. Parked on the lawn beside a battery of Corvettes was the owner's French Aerospatiale SA 341 Gazelle military helicopter. Mounted in the reception area were three Callaway turbomotors, including a stillborn V8 for Indy cars. They resembled sculptured ingots more than real-world power plants. I was quick to learn that aesthetics are held in high regard at Callaway Engineering.

The boss was out back, as usual, his head buried in the innards of a Corvette called the Sledgehammer. (That's the machine pictured on our opening spread.) It was being prepared for a shoot-out involving the world's fastest road cars. Organized by a German automobile magazine, the test was to involve the likes of a factory Ferrari F40, a Ruf Porsche, a tweaked-up factory 959 Porsche and an AMG Mercedes-Benz, and was set for Volkswagen's ultrafast test track at Ehra Lessien, West Germany. Callaway, his chief engineer Tim Good and high-performance expert Carroll Smith were fitting the special 'Vette with larger Rotomaster turbos, slipperier bodywork and other niceties with a single target in mind: a top speed of 250 mph.

The pristine shop was a hot rodder's nirvana, packed to the rafters with state-of-the-art machine tools, many of which were linked to an exotic CAD/CAM system that permits Callaway and Good to create a component on the computer, then have itautomatically carved from billet aluminum or steel by robot machines. All of the custom Callaway Corvette bits and pieces--brackets, pumps, fittings, etc.--that are part of the twin-turbo installation are not cast but individually machined to perfect tolerances in this way. "That's hardly the cheapest way to do business," says Callaway, his lanky frame hovering over a shimmering milling machine, "but our motto is 'Execute first and let the price fall where it may.' And we sort of have a feeling that a lot of people out there breathe hard over the same level of execution that we do."

And execute they do at Callaway Engineering. Their tour de force is the totally blueprinted engine, which is a masterpiece of packaging and high-performance engineering. The trick was to snug the twin turbochargers, with their attendant plumbing and microprocessors, into the confined under-hood compartment of the Corvette. Callaway solved the problem by hiding them on either side of the oil pan, with the beautifully polished intercoolers (to cool the fuel charge as it enters the combustion chambers) mounted atop the engine Hanking the fuel-injection system. The result is one of the most efficient yetaesthetically pleasing power plants in the world. And is it effective? Consider that a stock Corvette is rated at 240 hp (actually closer to 210 hp, due to erratic mass-pro duction tolerances, say the experts) and generates 340 foot-pounds of torque. When Callaway and company complete their labors, those numbers are elevated to 382 hp and a diesellike 562 foot-pounds. Moreover, these outputs are also designed to provide smooth performance, good fuel economy (approximately 16 miles per gallon) and sufficient reliability to warrant a 12-month, 12,000-mile warranty.

With this monster engine mounted inside a stock-appearing Corvette body, the Callaway Corvette might be described as understated overkill. Only the 17-inch Dymag cast-magnesium wheels and a slightly modified chin spoiler provide external clues that this is perhaps the fastest production road car in the world. The interior, save for the optional leather seats and a tiny V.D.O. boost gauge neatly integrated into the dash panel, is stock. What lies concealed underneath is a nasty little secret shared by the driver, Callaway and all the Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs and other 'Vettes left wobbling helplessly in its wake.

It is not lost on Callaway's bemused spirit that his car is built in perhaps the most hostile automotive environment this side of downtown Hong Kong. Despite its natural beauty, Connecticut is a rabbit's warren of narrow roads, no passing zones and rigidly enforced speed limits. Worse yet, radar detectors are illegal and the double nickel is an article of faith. Driving a car with the Callaway's potential in Connecticut is like trying to hold a free-choice conference at the Vatican.

Therefore, any test driving achieved by Callaway must be accomplished at the massive Transportation Research Center's high-speed oval in Marysville, Ohio. Still, a somewhat restrained lour around the sylvan precincts of Old Lyme drives home the point: The Callaway is a monster machine. The awesome power of the turbos is revealed in three ways: a faint shriek ofimpellers as they pump gobs of fuel into the combustion chambers, the whisk of the gauge on the dash toward maximum boost and, most vivid of all, the g force that seems to want to compress the driver and the passenger into the luggage compartment behind the seats.

Thanks to the 17-inch lightweight magnesium wheels that remove 30 pounds from the stock unsprung weight and the P275/40ZR Goodyear Eagle Gatorback low-profile, high-performance tires, the Corvette lays down its power with a minimum of wheelspin or weird yawing that can often be the result of excessive applications of torque. The acceleration arrives with a steady, lurbinelike surge, devoid of the insane, whoopee-cushion explosions of boost that often distinguish turbocharged engines from the norm. When world-ranked sports-car ace Derek Bell first drove the Callaway, he remarked that it was nearly impossible to discern that the engine was turboed. And he was right. There is so much smooth horsepower and torque available that the automobile seems possessed of an engine displacing perhaps 700 cubic inches, as opposed to one half that size.

Like all sophisticated rear-drive high-performance cars, the Corvette is great fun to fling through the corners. Steering is about neutral, with no evidence of speed-scrubbing understeer or tail-wagging oversteer. The firm, precise rack-and-pinion steering is power assisted, but one would never know unless one were trying to squeeze into a parking place. Chevrolet can be credited with offering a complete sports car, with great handling, ergonomics and over-all function.

The car tracks at high speeds like a wire-guided TOW missile. The urgency of the engine makes any speed limit on this continent seem Paleolithic and the danger is to let the machine have its head. Eighty or 90 miles an hour seems a stately lope and, unless one attends to business, one is doomed to be riddled by the dreaded rays of In-stant-On radar. But with the Callaway turbos humming obediently a few inches beyond your throttle foot, the urge to let it all hang out borders on the irresistible.

Callaway offers the car with a pair of transmissions. The basic models, a coupe or a convertible, with either the factory-option Z51 or the standard sport suspensions, come stock with a new six-speed manual and 3.07:1 rear-axle ratio. The coupe version, fitted with the standard sport suspension package, a front spoiler and side skirts, is the fastest of the lot, having been clocked at 191.70 mph. But for normal transportation, one ought to opt for the coupe or the ragtop with the optional Callaway-designed four-speed automatic. A special version of the G.M. Turbo Hy-dramatic has been fitted with an English-designed Laycock/GKN electric-overdrive unit that offers tremendous low-speed acceleration (better, in fact, than the manual version), coupled with quiet, low-rev cruising. For a vehicle possessing such enormous torque, a six-speed manual seems almost frivolous, because performance is available across such a wide rpm range. The car is so flexible that aftera few miles, one becomes convinced that a single forward gear would be sufficient.

The unique part about the Callaway Corvette is its shirttail relationship to the gigantic G.M. division of Chevrolet. While you'll seldom find such a beast in a dealer's showroom, the automobile can be ordered through 60 high-performance Chevrolet dealers around the nation (order code RPO B2K). The vehicle must be equipped with Chevrolet's special-equipment option that includes larger 13-inch brakes with four piston calipers, a power-steering cooler, Z51 mufflers and a longer front air dam. That, plus roughly $26,000 extra for the special modifications made by Callaway and approximately 100 test miles given the car before delivery, will place this extraordinary car in your hands.

"I'm not sure this all makes sense in a business plan," Callaway says. 'The car is an effect, not a cause, which I suppose is the antithesis of the way a car business ought to operate." But would Lee Iacocca or Roger Smith call what is happening in Old Lyme the car business in the first place? Then again, would Reeves Callaway call what they build in Detroit cars?

Remember the vaunted shoot-out in West Germany we mentioned earlier in this article"? As we went to press, we learned that weather had intervened and the European cars had been taken to the Nardo track on the boot of Italy for their timed high-speed runs. The test involved a Ruf-modified 911 Porsche turbo, an ultra-exotic four-wheel-drive Porsche 959, aturbocharged Ferrari F40 and a hot-rodded Mercedes-Benz 300E, AMG Hammer. The results, under the stingy, unblinking eye ofthe electronic timer, were illuminating, to say the least. The Ruf was quickest at 212 mph. The 959 was second fastest at 210 mph, while the Ferrari surprisingly fell short of the 200-mph barrier by one mile per hour. The AMG was way off the pace at 179 mph.

But what about the Callaway? Logistics prevented the Sledgehammer from being shipped to Italy, so Reeves and his crew drove it from Connecticut to their old haunt at Ohio's Transportation Research Center. Sporting new, subtly restyled bodywork below the belt line by Canadian designer Paul Deutschman, the Sledgehammer succeeded beyond the team's wildest dreams. When driver John Lingenfelter rolled to a stop after his run, the clocks were locked at 254.76 mph, making it the fastest production road car in history. And with some careful tweaks in the bodywork and the engine, Callaway is confident thatanother ten mph can be found. Keep in mind that this monster was driven--in normal traffic--to and from the testsite with no more muss or fuss than your average Honda Civic. Has Callaway pushed the envelope? Hell, it's time for a new one! As in 300 mph on the road?

Last words: Any machine as incredible-sounding as the stock Callaway Corvette wasn't going to escape the Playboy staff's lead feet and kamikaze driving style, so we called Callaway and asked if there were a car in the Chicago area that wecould test-drive. There wasn't, but Callaway oivner Elliot Rabin volunteered to drive his car from New York to Chicago forus to check out. Talk about Mr. Nice Guy! We drove his car and set some low-flying records on the Outer Drive before reluctantly turning in the keys. Our bottom-line impression is that in a world where spending $60,000 for a piece of auto exotica doesn't even warrant a second thought to many, this machine gives you your money's worth--and then some. It truly is America's top gun on wheels.