When is a $47,000 Corvette not a Corvette? When it’s a souped-up, high-flying 600-horsepower Callaway ’Vette.

The modern Chevrolet Corvette is an astoundingly capable sports car for the money. At $46,950, it has a 6.2-liter engine that can produce 430 horsepower and launch the car from 0–60 in 4.3 seconds. That’s 0.3 seconds faster than a 325-hp Porsche 911 . . . and for $35,650 less.

Still, there are pockets of enthusiast engineers who see the ’Vette as merely a platform upon which to build, a work of art just a few parts short of a masterpiece. These guys tweak Corvettes to higher standards of performance, creating rare, semi-custom and thoroughly unique bespoke sports cars.

It takes a special kind of audacity to tinker with a car that is already as capable as a Corvette, and such is the brand of chutzpah displayed by the most legendary of all Corvette modifiers: Callaway Cars.

When we were recently offered a test flight in a Callaway ’Vette, we thus had only two questions: When was takeoff, and which one would we get to pilot? Callaway, you see, can install a variety of components to juice up your average Corvette — the standard combination of which costs $18,500 and includes an Eaton supercharger and upgrades to the exhaust and fuel system, as well as a new hood with a big bulge in it to show the world that you’re packing.

This takes Chevy’s stock 6.2-liter V8 engine and boosts its power output to 580 hp and 510 pounds-feet of torque. That bit of tuning gives it a 0–60 time of 3.5 seconds and a top speed of 200 mph.

Still, with Chevrolet poised to debut its own screamingly fast, 600-hp Corvette ZR1 in 2009, Callaway has of late turned its attention to producing some even more rarefied variants on the Corvette theme. Since 2006, Callaway has been building custom made C16s, which are available in three basic variants: a coupe ($170,470) and a cabrio ($179,490), which dial up the 6.5-liter Chevy engine to 650 hp and 550 pounds-feet of torque, and a speedster ($305,000), which amps the power up to a ridiculous 700 hp.

When I arrived at the company’s production facility in Con­necticut — with my copilot, Brennan, in tow — I was handed the keys to a prototype with performance specs somewhere between the standard package and the coupe. I was as giddy as Chuck Yea­ger in the seat of a Bell X-1. Once safely out of sight of the folks at Callaway, I punched the accelerator, flattening us against the seats. “Holy crap,” Brennan said.

Well put, my friend. The Corvette engine is so muscular to begin with that when the supercharger kicks in, power is layered on top of power, and you can’t help but feel as if you’ve let a wild animal out of its cage. This is a loud, angry beast of a car that only gets more so the harder you push it.

And although the Callaway has remarkable handling and wonderful brakes (if it didn’t, Brennan and I would surely be dead right now), you can’t help but feel that its engine has so much power that it could easily overwhelm all the systems in place to control it. It’s an unnerving feeling, but one that your average pilot could probably relate to — or, just as likely, come to crave.  callawaycars.com

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