He Sells Semi Trucks in Small-Town Tennessee – And Quietly Owns More Than 1,000 Cars, Including 25 Hellcats

Don Baskin’s name never comes up when enthusiasts argue about America’s greatest private car collections. It probably should. The Covington, Tennessee truck dealer has filled roughly 400,000 square feet of warehouses with more than a thousand vehicles – somewhere around 20 Novas, about 25 Hellcats, and a multi-time NMCA championship racing career almost nobody outside West Tennessee knew about.

Ask a room full of enthusiasts to name America’s greatest private muscle car collections and you will hear the same handful of famous names every time. Almost nobody says Don Baskin. He runs a truck and equipment sales operation in Covington, a small West Tennessee town north of Memphis, and for decades he has been quietly filling warehouse after warehouse with cars that most people only see behind museum ropes. When 1320Video finally got inside, they did not walk through a garage. They walked through roughly 400,000 square feet of buildings holding more than a thousand vehicles – and the soft-spoken man giving the tour could recite the engine, transmission, rear gear and what he paid for nearly every single one, off the top of his head.

The Collection Tour Nobody Knew Existed

The video is a walking tour, and that format is exactly right here, because the scale only lands when you watch the buildings keep going. 1320Video describes Corvettes lined up in every color Don liked enough to buy, rows of cars they call some of the rarest they have ever laid eyes on, and a scattering of one-off contraptions that do not fit any category at all. There is no dramatic reveal and no staged reaction. The camera simply follows Don down aisle after aisle while he points at things and explains, in the same flat tone, why each one came home with him.

What keeps it from becoming a numbers exercise is that Don talks about the cars the way an owner does, not the way an investor does. Viewers were quick to notice that at the very first car he stops at, he takes a moment to pay respects to a friend who has since passed. Elsewhere he walks the crew through his drag racing history – the achievements, the trophies, and the race cars he never sold because selling them was never the point. By the time the tour reaches the back buildings, the video has stopped being about how much this is worth and started being about how one person accumulates this much without anyone outside his county noticing.

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“I Ain’t Got That Many Novas – Probably About 20”

The line viewers keep quoting back is his answer about Chevy IIs. Asked how many Novas he has, Don shrugs and says he does not have that many – probably about 20. Later he mentions, just as casually, that he has around 25 Hellcats. Those two sentences did more for the video’s comment section than any drone shot could have. People who have spent their whole lives around cars showed up to say they had never heard of this man and could not process what they were seeing, and the most common reaction was not envy. It was disbelief that a collection at this level had stayed this quiet for this long.

The other thing commenters could not get over was his recall. Viewers pointed out that he could be asked about any car at random and answer immediately with what he paid, how the engine was set up, what transmission and rear end were under it, and the story of why he bought it. That is not a rehearsed script – the crew is moving faster than anyone could memorize a route for, and the answers keep coming. For a lot of viewers, that detail is what separated this from every other collection tour on the platform. The cars are staggering, but the man remembering all of them is the actual draw.

The Drag Racer Hiding Behind the Truck Business

The racing is not a footnote either. Don Baskin is a genuine multi-time drag racing champion, with multiple NMCA class titles to his name, and he built the truck and equipment business in Covington that funded all of it. He also runs Baskin Motorsports, which buys and sells race cars, engines, transmissions and racing hardware – which explains why so much of what is stacked in those warehouses is competition equipment rather than showroom-clean survivors. The collection reads less like a portfolio somebody assembled and more like fifty years of a racer refusing to let anything go.

In 2023 he went a step further and took over Jackson Dragway, the eighth-mile strip off I-40 between Memphis and Nashville that opened in 1967 and stands as Tennessee’s oldest dragstrip. He put real money into it, including a new racing surface and expanded paved pit parking. That chapter has since closed – in November 2025 Baskin announced that Jackson Dragway and nearby River Road Raceway would shut down after 58 years, a decision he framed around wanting to spend more of his time with family. Watching this video now, with that news attached to it, changes the tone of the whole tour.

Why a Building Full of Novas Actually Matters

It is worth pausing on why a building full of Novas is a bigger deal than it sounds. The Nova was Chevrolet’s cheap compact, and the SS 396 turned it into one of the meanest things Chevy ever built. For 1970 the 396 had actually been bored out to 402 cubic inches, though Chevrolet kept the 396 badge for name recognition, and the top L78 version was rated at 375 gross horsepower and 415 lb-ft of torque – the most potent engine ever fitted to a factory Nova. Roughly 3,765 L78 cars were built that year out of about 5,567 big-block Novas total. Owning twenty Novas is not hoarding. Depending on which ones they are, it is a meaningful slice of a very small production run.

The Hellcats tell the other half of the story. When Dodge launched the 2015 Challenger SRT Hellcat with a supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI making 707 horsepower and 650 lb-ft, it was the first factory-supercharged HEMI and, at the time, the most powerful muscle car ever sold. It even shipped with two key fobs, red and black, with the black one capping output at 500 horsepower. That a collector who came up racing 1960s iron also went out and bought roughly two dozen of them says something about how he sees this stuff. He is not curating an era. He is collecting the whole argument, start to finish.

The Part Viewers Cannot Stop Talking About

That is ultimately what makes the video worth 44 minutes of your evening. The most common comment under it is some version of turn this into a museum – people offering to pay admission and spend a full day wandering through. The second most common is that Don comes across as someone you would sit next to at a diner and never suspect. If watching it leaves you wanting to build something rather than buy it, our deep dive on Coyote-swapping a classic Mustang covers the one measurement that quietly decides that entire project. Either way, this tour is a reminder that the best collections in America are not always the ones with a website.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.