Hot Rides: Joey Lange’s muscle cars

One collector’s storage facility in rural Indiana holds 53 muscle cars, starting from a single 1968 Plymouth GTX Hemi that grew into a lineup spanning a Superbird, a Shelby GT500, and a 1969 Indy 500 pace car. The rarest find is a Dodge Viper GTS-R 1:33 edition, one of only 33 ever built. Here is what’s parked inside Joey’s Garage and how a modest collection turned into something closer to a private museum.

A storage building in rural Indiana holds more muscle car history than some museums manage to assemble. Fifty-three cars deep, the collection didn’t start with a masterplan, it started with a single 1968 Plymouth GTX Hemi that one owner couldn’t stop thinking about. Name almost any legendary muscle car from the late 1960s or early 1970s and there’s a good chance it’s parked somewhere inside. What’s tucked in the back, though, is stranger and rarer than anything up front.

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From One Hemi to Fifty-Three Cars

Joey Lange’s collection near Ferdinand, Indiana grew from that first 1968 GTX Hemi into 53 vehicles spanning Mopar, Ford, and GM muscle. The lineup includes a 1970 Dodge Challenger with the 440 Six Pack, a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird, a 1969 Shelby GT500 Mustang, and a genuine pace car from the 1969 Indianapolis 500. The rarest piece might be the Dodge Viper GTS-R “1:33” edition, one of only 33 built to commemorate a Laguna Seca lap record, and Lange’s car carries build number 21.

Inside Joey’s Garage

The cars don’t just sit in a warehouse. The facility, branded “Joey’s Garage,” is climate-controlled with a dust-collection system to keep decades-old paint and chrome pristine, and the lobby is built to look like a vintage filling station complete with 1930s Shell gas pumps, motorcycles, and period engines on display. It’s less a private collection than a small, working museum that happens to be on family property.

Why Collections Like This Matter

Private collections built one car at a time, the way Lange’s was, tend to preserve genuinely driveable history rather than museum pieces roped off behind glass. A garage like this becomes a resource other enthusiasts can point to when they want to see a real 440 Six Pack or an original Indy pace car up close instead of just a photo in a book. It also says something about how muscle car culture actually spreads: not through a single big-money purchase, but through decades of one car leading to the next.

Why a Hemi GTX Was the Perfect Starting Point

Starting a muscle car collection with a 1968 Plymouth GTX Hemi wasn’t a modest choice, the GTX was Plymouth’s upscale muscle offering, positioned above the Road Runner with more standard equipment, and the 426 Hemi option made it one of the most powerful, and most expensive, cars Chrysler built that year. Beginning there rather than with a more common small-block car set the tone for a collection that would keep chasing genuinely rare, top-tier examples rather than volume.

The Superbird’s Wing Wasn’t Just for Show

The Plymouth Superbird’s towering rear wing and pointed nose cone look dramatic sitting still, but both were functional aerodynamic aids developed for NASCAR competition, where Plymouth needed every mph it could find to compete with Ford and Mercury’s fastback bodies on high-speed superspeedways. Road-going Superbirds inherited that race-bred bodywork essentially unchanged, which is part of why they remain among the most visually distinctive, and valuable, muscle cars Chrysler ever built for public sale.

An Indy Pace Car Is a Different Kind of Rare

A genuine pace car from the Indianapolis 500 carries a specific kind of provenance that ordinary production cars simply can’t match, official pace cars are typically built in small, documented batches specifically for track and ceremonial duty, then sold off afterward with paperwork tracing them directly back to race weekend. Owning one isn’t just about owning a rare trim package, it’s about owning a car with a verified role in one of motorsport’s most-watched annual events.

The Viper GTS-R That Almost Nobody Owns

The Viper GTS-R “1:33” commemorates a specific, verifiable achievement, a Viper GTS-R race car’s lap record at Laguna Seca Raceway, and Dodge built exactly 33 street cars to mark it, one for each second of that record time. With Lange’s example carrying build number 21 out of that tiny run, it represents a level of scarcity that most muscle car collectors, even serious ones, never get the chance to own even a single example of.

A Garage Designed Like a Museum, Because It Basically Is One

The climate control and dust-collection systems inside Joey’s Garage aren’t just creature comforts, they’re preservation infrastructure, the same kind of environmental control museums use to keep original paint, chrome, and interior materials from degrading over decades of storage. Building that infrastructure into a private garage, rather than treating it as an afterthought, signals a collector thinking in terms of decades rather than years.

The Vintage Filling Station Isn’t Just Decoration

Dressing the lobby as a 1930s-style filling station, complete with period Shell pumps and vintage motorcycles, does more than set a mood, it puts the muscle car collection in a broader timeline of American automotive history rather than presenting it as an isolated hobby. Visitors walking past decades-old gas pumps on their way to a 1970 Hemi GTX get a sense of the full arc the cars themselves represent, from the earliest days of roadside filling stations to the peak of Detroit’s horsepower wars.

A Collection That Keeps Growing

Fifty-three cars is a snapshot, not necessarily a final count, private collections built the way Lange’s was tend to keep expanding as long as the right car turns up at the right moment. That ongoing, opportunistic approach to collecting, rather than treating the garage as a finished project, is part of what separates a genuine enthusiast’s collection from a static museum display.

Insurance Alone Is Its Own Undertaking

Properly insuring a fifty-plus car collection that includes genuinely rare, high-value pieces requires specialized agreed-value policies rather than standard classic car coverage, a detail that rarely makes it into feature stories about private collections. It represents a significant, ongoing cost of maintaining a garage like Joey’s that has nothing to do with the purchase price of any individual car. Agreed-value coverage also requires periodic appraisals to keep pace with a market where rare muscle cars can appreciate significantly in just a few years, adding yet another recurring task to running a collection this size.

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