Aftermarket Corvettes: Tuners, Restomods, Mods and Builds

The Overview

The Corvette has always been two cars: the one Chevrolet sold and the one its owners made. Zora Arkus-Duntov put the parts for the second one in the order guide — the fuel injection, the L88, the ZR1 package — and when GM would not go further, the dealers and the tuners did: Baldwin-Motion’s Phase III 454s, Greenwood’s wide-body racers turned street cars, and from 1987 the Callaway Twin Turbo, the only tuner car ever sold with a Chevrolet RPO code and a Chevrolet warranty.

Since then every generation has had its names. Lingenfelter and Hennessey took the C5, C6 and C7 past 1,000 horsepower; Pratt & Miller and Katech built the C6RS from their racing parts bins; Callaway kept building supercharged cars and Le Mans racers; and the restomod builders turned the C2 and C3 into the most expensive custom cars at Barrett-Jackson and Mecum, with LS and LT power, modern chassis and prices past $700,000. The C8 has its own aftermarket already: superchargers for the LT2, twin-turbo kits, wheels, aero and the question of what voids the warranty.

This page gathers all of it: the tuners and what each is known for, every tuner Corvette the site has a guide for with its picture, the restomod and build features, the mods guides by generation, the aftermarket news as it happens, the videos, and the Callaways, restomods and tuner cars for sale. The Callaway and Greenwood guides and the Mods hub go deeper on their own subjects.

Seventy Years of Making the Corvette Faster

The dealers and the racers, 1960s–1980s

The first Corvette tuners were Chevrolet dealers with a parts counter and a dynamometer. Nickey in Chicago, Dana in California and Baldwin Chevrolet on Long Island built big-block Corvettes GM would not: Joel Rosen’s Baldwin-Motion Phase III cars of 1967–74 came with 427s and 454s, Motion’s own bodywork and a written guarantee of 11-second quarter miles. Don Yenko’s Pennsylvania dealership did the same for Camaros and Novas and lent its name to a Corvette again in 2019.

John Greenwood came at it from the track. His wide-body C3s ran IMSA and Le Mans in the 1970s with 700-horsepower aluminum big blocks and bodywork that stretched the Corvette’s shape to the edge of the rules, and the street cars that followed — the Sebring GT, the GTO, the turbocharged Daytona of 1980–82 — put that look on the road. Dick Guldstrand, who had raced Corvettes for Chevrolet in the 1960s, built the Guldstrand GS80 on the C4 and the GS90 and Nassau Roadster on the ZR-1, cars that read like the Grand Sport Chevrolet had not yet made.

Callaway and the RPO code, 1987–today

In 1987 Chevrolet did something it had never done: it put a tuner’s car in its own order guide. RPO B2K sent a new Corvette from Bowling Green to Reeves Callaway in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and returned it with two turbochargers, 345 horsepower and a Chevrolet warranty, for $19,995 over the price of the car. Callaway built about 500 of them through 1991, and in October 1988 one of them — the Sledgehammer, with 880 horsepower — drove from Connecticut to the Transportation Research Center in Ohio, ran 254.76 mph and drove home. Callaway has built Corvettes ever since: the SuperNatural, the C12, the C16 and C17, the SC757 and the AeroWagen on the C7, and the Le Mans and GT3 race cars.

The modern tuners took the LS engines where Chevrolet would not. John Lingenfelter, a drag racer and engine builder since the 1970s, made Lingenfelter Performance Engineering the C4 and C5 era’s reference, with the 383 stroker, the twin-turbo C5 and the 427 Eliminator; the company builds C8 packages and the Cunningham editions today. John Hennessey’s HPE cars pushed the C6 ZR1 and the C7 Z06 past 1,000 horsepower and 200 mph with the YouTube runs to prove it. Pratt & Miller, Corvette Racing’s builder, put a Katech 8.2-liter in a street C6 and called it the C6RS. Specter Werkes gave the C6 its own body and a 427.

Restomods, mods and the C8

The restomod is the aftermarket’s biggest business now. A 1963 split-window or a 1967 convertible on an Art Morrison chassis with an LS3, LT4 or LS9, modern brakes, air conditioning and a hand-built interior sells for more than the original car, and the best of them — the Kindig CF1, the big-block C2s, the C1 roadsters built for celebrities — have set the records at Barrett-Jackson and Mecum. The site follows every major auction’s restomods and the builders behind them.

Most modified Corvettes are modified in a driveway, and the site’s Mods hub is for those owners: the bolt-ons that are worth the money on each generation, the cold-air intakes and exhausts that actually work, the radiator upgrades for a hot C3, and for the C8 the question that matters most, which mods keep the warranty. The aftermarket news below has the rest as it happens: the new superchargers for the LT2, the twin-turbo kits, the wheels, the aero and the tuner cars at auction.

MORE: THE CALLAWAY GUIDE / THE GREENWOOD GUIDE / THE MODS HUB / THE BEST CUSTOM CARS