Chevrolet’s 4th generation Corvette might have been a nice departure from the languishing and honestly outdated C3 platform, and sure, Chevrolet pretty much took a gap year in 1983 to make sure things were as good as they could be (snicker if you will), but the truth was that until the end of the 1980s the Corvette was still a smogged-out dog. Cross-Fire engines, the Doug Nash 4+3 overdrive manual, and the saw blade wheel design makes you think of gold chainers and young surf bros who rode around shirtless looking for women. Even when I was a young lad in the late 1980s I could tell you that the guys driving C4 Corvettes were just wanting to look good.

But around 1987, a real performance streak started to appear within Chevrolet, and by 1990 two models would take care of the serious performance junkies, and that will be your choice today. Pick wisely, and don’t use future value speculation as a criteria. You are buying the car to scare yourself with while proving that performance just might be alive after all.

1. 1995 Corvette ZR-1

“The Corvette From Hell”. “King of the Road”. Call it whatever you will, but when General Motors acquired Group Lotus in 1986, they actually made a smart move and tapped them to work some magic onto a new engine that would turn the Corvette into a car that would actually compete on a world stage with power that commanded respect. The result was the LT5, a quad-cam, 32 valve 5.7 that started with 375 horsepower at the 1990 debut, and ballooned up to 405 horsepower by 1995, nearly double the amount of a standard C4 Corvette. Not only was this Vette ballsy, but it would actually handle, since GM threw the best equipment at it and got Lotus to tune it. A 0-60 time of 4.4 seconds and a top speed in the 180mph range stock dropped jaws, as did the price tag.

2. 1991 RPO B2K (Callaway Twin-Turbo)

Does natural aspiration just not do it for you? Callaway had the answer: from 1987 to 1991, if you checked the option coded RPO B2K and were able to pay for it, you wound up with one of Callaway’s twin-turbocharged creations. These cars were what directly inspired Chevrolet to start building the ZR-1 in the first place, and for good reason: by the end of the run in 1991, B2Ks were in the neighborhood of 450hp and torque figures in the 600 ft/lbs range. You lose a bit of the off-the-line torque, but more than make up for it when the boost comes on somewhere in the middle of third gear. That’s when the tach suddenly picks up the pace and the digital numbers in the speedometer start to blur.

There’s your options: pure factory or tuned? Naturally aspirated or turbocharged? Bodykit or no? Let us know below!