Corvette Legend Reeves Callaway Dead at 75

Reeves Callaway, founder of Callaway Cars and a legend in the Corvette world, has died. Callaway Cars confirmed in an email that he passed on Tuesday after injuries sustained in a fall in his Newport Beach, California home. He was 75.

Ely "Reeves" Callaway III was born in November 1947 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and raised in Darien, Connecticut. His father, Ely Callaway, founded the Callaway golf company, one of the world's premiere manufacturers of golf clubs. He raced go-karts as a kid, and in 1973, won the SCCA Formula Vee championship. By 1976 he was an instructor at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving.

After his professional racing career didn't pan out, he turned his attention to modifying cars. His first product, a turbocharger kit for the E21-generation BMW 320i, generated enough interest to lead Callaway to start Callaway Cars from his garage in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1977. Soon, he began offering performance kits for other cars.

"We don't call ourselves a tuner," Callaway told Road & Track in a 2017 interview. "A tuner takes an aggregate of parts that already exists, bolts them on the automobile, and calls it a customization. Everything we make is made specifically for the car. And we manufacture it ourselves."

Quickly, his work attracted attention from major automakers. Alfa Romeo was the first, commissioning a turbocharger kit for the GTV6 that debuted in 1983, then it was GM. Callaway developed a twin-turbo kit for the Chevrolet Corvette, which became available through Chevy dealerships in 1987. At the time, a standard Corvette offered 240 horsepower; Callaway's twin-turbo Corvette upped that to 382 horsepower, making it one of the most powerful cars on sale at the time.