He is no longer alive. He started Callaway Cars and became famous in the world of Corvettes. Callaway Cars said he died suddenly on Tuesday because he fell at his home in Newport Beach, California, and hurt himself. He was 75. Born in November 1947 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Ely “Reeves” Callaway III grew up in Darien, Connecticut. His father, Ely Callaway, started one of the best golf club companies in the world when he started the Callaway Golf Company. He used to race go-karts, and in 1973, he won the SCCA Formula Vee title. In 1976, he started working as a teacher at the Bob Bondurant School of High-Performance Driving. When he couldn’t make it as a professional race car driver, he turned to making changes to cars. The demand for his first offering, a turbocharger package for the BMW 320i of the E21 generation, led him to start Callaway Cars in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1977. He jumped right away to sell speed upgrades for other cars. In an interview with Road & Track in 2017, Callaway said, “We don’t call ourselves a tuner.”A tuner takes a set of parts that are already in the car, bolts them on, and calls it a change. Everything we make is made with cars in mind. We make it ourselves as well.
