This Phoenix Collector Bought Back the Muscle Car He Drove in High School — Then Filled His Garage With a Real Superbird and Every Viper Ever Built

Hidden in Phoenix, Arizona is a private garage holding a real 1970 Plymouth Superbird, a Boss 429 Mustang, and a Viper from every generation ever built. Its owner did not set out to build a museum — he set out to buy back the cars of his own past, starting with the Plymouth Road Runner he first drove as a teenager. Hagerty’s Larry Chen got a rare look inside.

Most car collections are either garages full of daily-driven favorites or climate-controlled vaults where nothing ever turns a wheel. Rich Fairservis built something in between, hidden behind an unmarked door in Phoenix, Arizona. Inside is a real 1970 Plymouth Superbird, a 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 429, a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS, a Dodge Demon, and at least one Viper from every generation the model was ever built — including a first-year car with barely 300 miles on it. Photographer and filmmaker Larry Chen spent a day walking through it for Hagerty, and what he found wasn’t a museum. It was a man slowly buying back the cars that shaped him, one at a time, for decades. Among the rarest machines in the building sits a far more ordinary Road Runner — the one he says he actually drove as a teenager, bought back years later for reasons that had nothing to do with investment value.

The video, part of Hagerty’s “Capturing Car Culture” series, follows Fairservis room by room as he explains not just what he owns, but why. He isn’t a collector who buys to display and forget. According to the tour, his rule is simple: keep at least one example to preserve exactly as it left the factory, and keep a second to actually drive. The pair of 2008 Hurst 50th Anniversary Vipers — a matching matte-gold coupe and roadster — are a perfect example of that philosophy in action, one kept pristine and one built to be used.

What comes through watching Chen’s walkthrough is how personal the collection is. Fairservis doesn’t linger on horsepower figures or auction estimates the way most collector profiles do. He lingers on memory. At one point in the tour he stops at a Plymouth Road Runner he says he owned in high school and admits that buying it back decades later wasn’t really about the car’s rarity — it was about sitting behind the same wheel again. Viewers picked up on it immediately; it’s the moment commenters kept coming back to, several calling it the most genuine part of the entire tour.

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Why a Real Superbird Still Anchors Any Serious Collection

The 1970 Plymouth Superbird in Fairservis’s garage isn’t just a rare car — it’s a piece of NASCAR history built to solve a very specific problem. Plymouth built the Superbird, with its towering rear wing and elongated aerodynamic nose cone, largely to win back Richard Petty, who had left the brand to race a Ford the year before. It worked. Petty returned to Plymouth for the 1970 season behind the wheel of the Superbird, not the similar-looking Dodge Charger Daytona that Dodge fielded for other drivers, and the two cars are often confused for exactly that reason. Petty won 18 of the 40 races he entered that season, led nearly half of every lap raced, and captured nine pole positions, a run that would likely have produced a championship if a mid-season crash hadn’t sidelined him for six races.

Plymouth had to build enough Superbirds for the street to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rules, and the final number came out to 1,920 cars for the 1970 model year — a tiny production run for a full-size Detroit muscle car, which is part of why surviving examples now command serious money at auction and why finding one in private hands, actually maintained rather than mothballed, is unusual. Dodge’s own version of the formula, the Charger Daytona, wore a nearly identical nose and wing but was built the year before and campaigned by different drivers, which is exactly why the two cars still get mixed up in comment sections more than fifty years later. Owning a real Superbird isn’t just about the car itself; it’s about owning a direct piece of one of the fiercest aerodynamic arms races in American racing history.

A Collection Built Car by Car, Not All at Once

What separates Fairservis’s garage from a typical high-dollar collection is the range and the intent behind it. The Boss 429 represents Ford’s answer to NASCAR’s own engine rules in 1969, when the sanctioning body required a minimum number of street cars carrying a race-bound engine before it could compete. Ford ended up shoehorning the massive 429 into the Mustang’s engine bay by widening the front shock towers and reworking the front suspension just to make it fit, and the resulting cars were built in numbers small enough that clean, numbers-matching examples are now among the most sought-after Mustangs ever produced. The Chevelle SS represents Chevrolet’s most direct answer to the same muscle car wars, and the Dodge Demon rounds out the Mopar side of the garage — a compact factory performance model most collectors overlook in favor of its bigger, more famous siblings.

Then there’s the wall of Vipers, spanning the model’s entire production run from the original V10-powered roadster through the final 2017 GTS. That side of the collection tells a completely different story — not one of 1960s and ’70s Detroit muscle, but of Dodge’s modern attempt to build the rawest, most dangerous production sports car it could get away with selling to the public. Pairing a 300-mile first-year Viper next to a 1970 Superbird in the same warehouse makes an argument most single-era collections can’t: that the muscle car era never really ended, it just kept changing shape.

What Makes This Garage Different From a Museum

Most collections this deep end up static — cars parked under covers, insurance policies more important than ignition keys. Fairservis’s approach runs the opposite direction. Nothing in the tour is presented as too precious to start. Cars are grouped by generation and by story rather than by value, and Chen’s camera lingers on the details that usually get cut from collector profiles: the worn seat in a car that’s actually been driven, the specific reason a particular example was chosen over a cleaner one that came up for sale first.

That’s ultimately what makes the video worth watching beyond the sheer horsepower on display. It’s easy to find videos of expensive cars parked in a row. It’s harder to find a collector willing to explain, on camera, that the most meaningful car in a warehouse full of seven-figure machines might be the modest Road Runner he learned to drive in.

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