Petrolicious, the creator of high-quality, original films and articles for classic car enthusiasts, has released its latest video, featuring Alex Leventhal’s mighty Callaway Corvette Twin Turbo with Wunderbar options.
Petrolicious celebrates the inventions, personalities and aesthetics that fuel a collective lust for great automotive machinery, and seeks to inform, entertain and inspire the community of enthusiasts and pique the interest of those who missed out.
Today, Petroleum takes over the story…
In 1987, if you checked a certain box, your brand new car didn’t go straight to the dealer. It rolled off the production line, was loaded onto a truck and disappeared for a few weeks. Somewhere far from the factory, a man with a mustache and a vision tore it apart, put two turbos in it and sent it back, still covered by the factory warranty.
That was the deal between General Motors and Reeves Callaway, the quiet engineer who convinced America’s largest automaker to turn over its flagship and make it faster.
Callaway was not a marketing guy. He was a craftsman disguised as an engineer, a racer who understood the poetry of precision. In his small workshop in Connecticut, he built turbo systems that turned European cars into perfectly mannered monsters. His BMWs, Alfas and Volkswagens didn’t just go faster; they went smoother. Strength and polish in equal measure. It was enough to get Detroit’s attention.
By the mid-1980s, Chevrolet needed an answer. The Corvette was capable, but not feared. Europe ruled the language of speed, and within Chevrolet, engineers were suffocated by paperwork and fear. The oil crises had taken the fun out of it. Risk was dead. Committees made decisions that engineers should have made. Callaway offered an escape route. He would take their car, give it teeth and send it back nicely. GM listened and, against its own nature, said yes.
If you ordered RPO B2K from 1987 to 1991, your new car left Bowling Green, was trucked to Old Lyme, and returned weeks later reborn. Callaway’s crew installed twin turbos, intercoolers, and a web of polished pipework that somehow worked as if it had been designed there from the start. It came back under guarantee, but is now capable of destroying the European elite.
“It is a car that surprises you,” says owner Alex Leventhal. “It looks like a Corvette, but the way it builds power, it’s silk until it’s not. You can tell it wasn’t designed by committee.”
The standard Callaway Twin Turbo was fast, smooth and deceptively civilized. But for the crazy, there was the Wunderbar option. “That’s where it turns into madness,” Alex said. “The boost comes like a second engine waking up, and the car remains completely calm while everything else goes hazy.”
The Wunderbar cars were the highlight. Closer to 400 hp and 575 Nm of torque, they turned the polite Twin Turbo into something that could chase the likes of the Ferrari F40 and Porsche 959. The comparison was not hype. It was math. At a time when American performance was measured in quarter miles, Callaway spoke in top speed and sustained boost. The Wunderbar was traveling at nearly 200 miles per hour on street tires as cold air blew through the vents. It was absurd. A Corvette, a fiberglass car from Kentucky, hanging among Maranello’s finest.
It shouldn’t have been possible. The F40 was sacred: a million-dollar altar to violence and ego. The Callaway was his antithesis, born of pragmatism and patience, and he could still catch it on the straights. That kind of heresy didn’t fit the story. Relatively speaking, only a few Callaways were built, and while an F40 now sells for millions, a pristine Twin Turbo might fetch a few hundred grand. Same era, same power, same speed, different mythologies. Europe had romance. America had results.
Early cars made 345 horsepower and 465 pound-feet of torque. The later Wunderbar specification added bigger turbos, better intercooling, custom wastegate tuning and fuel mapping that made the power come in like a flood rather than a crash. It changed the character without killing the charm. The real magic was how it behaved. It started clean, idled smoothly and handled traffic without complaint. It wasn’t cruel. It was balanced.
“When you drive it, you understand what Callaway was chasing,” Alex said. “It’s calm until you ask for chaos, and when it does, it’s perfect. It feels like something built by someone who cared.”
Other tuners went loud. Hennessey chased numbers. Lingenfelter hunted for trophies. AMG went business. Callaway went quiet and his cars were faster at it. He was the outsider who came in and somehow remained himself.
When GM bought Lotus and released the ZR-1, the partnership ended. The moment passed. But what it represented isn’t that. It was the last time a major manufacturer handed its flagship to a man and said, “Show us what’s possible.”
For Alex, that is why his car is important. “It’s proof,” he said. “Proof that an American can match the best in the world, and that one man with conviction can make the largest company in the world believe in him.”
He looked at the car sitting in the sun, the turbos cooling under the hood. “When you drive it now, it feels like you’re holding a piece of American courage in your hands,” he said. “It is a reminder of the time when courage still belonged in a workshop.”
Reeves Callaway died in 2023. But his cars still breathe. They’re more than fast: they’re proof that craft once transcended convention, and that sometimes the smartest thing a company can do is trust the guy with the mustache and the crazy idea.
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