When Tim Wellborn and wife Pam were first married they lived in a one-bedroom apartment so tiny they slept on a Hide-a-Bed couch. But it had one very important feature: a spacious 7-bay garage underneath for Tim's cars.
Today their house is modeled after George Washington's mansion, Mt. Vernon, but it's Tim's multi-garage compound that we're here for. It houses the greatest collection of rare 1971 Hemi Chargers ever assembled - vehicles that routinely fetch millions of dollars at auction - not that Tim plans on parting with any of them any time soon.
VEHICLES INSIDE :
Rare, 1971 Hemi Charger R/Ts, a Dodge T/A Challenger, a Plymouth AAR 'Cuda, Wing Cars, and his Daily Drivers, which include a Dodge Viper and Jaguar XKR, among others.
Select the STORY tab above for all the details. PHOTOS and VIDEO at right.
Tim Wellborn was only 13 when he accompanied his father to the local Dodge dealership to order a brand-new Butterscotch 1971 Charger R/T with an impressive 440-cubic inch Magnum V-8 under the hood. “The Hemi engine was an $800 option, a tremendous amount back then,” he recalled. “That car was so beautiful. It is the reason I love Chargers so much to this day.” The only problem was that his father had to order an automatic with air conditioning since his mother would be driving the car too, when what they really wanted was a Hemi-powered four-speed.
Fast-forward a few years later to the sight of Tim in his very first Hemi Charger, a blue four-speed with an engine so loud that it rattled the windows in future wife Pam’s high school building when he came to pick her up after classes. ”I had to sell that car, but I was able to buy it back in 2001. I was thrilled when I saw it, because it had remained in perfect condition all those years. It was like I had re-claimed a little piece of my past,”
When Pam and Tim first married, they lived in a one-bedroom garage apartment so tiny that they used a Hide-A-Bed couch for their bed, but it had one very important feature: a spacious seven-bay garage underneath for his cars. Although Pam didn’t fully appreciate the depth of Tim’s obsession at first, she caught on quickly. “Tim has had my heart since I was a teenager, and I wanted to share his passion in all areas,” she said.
“One of the first things he ever gave me was a stack of MOPAR manuals to read. I memorized those books. Before long I could quote facts about cars as well as he could.”
Today Tim boasts what may be the ultimate collection of the world-class muscle machines. Only 63 Charger R/Ts with Hemi engines were ever manufactured, and Tim owns 23 of them. He also has a total of 35 Dodge Chargers, in order to have an example of every kind of Charger ever built, and he is preparing to purchase number 36 in the near future. The cars are a dazzling kaleidoscope of colors, with descriptive paint names including Plum Crazy Purple, Sassy Grass Green, Panther Pink, Citron Yellow, Tor Red, Butterscotch, and Hemi Orange. They are kept in Alexander City, Alabama, where the Wellborns now live on an eight-acre estate formally owned by the founder of Russell Athleticwear, a company once headquartered there.
The house was built in 1938 and modeled after George Washington’s mansion, Mount Vernon. The house is a time capsule, with antique wall coverings, draperies, and cupolas and other structural details from that period. A small garage adjacent the greenhouse was the only garage on the property, so the first order of business was to hire an architectural firm to design and build several new garages to house their remarkable collection of cars.
The largest garage was built in a style similar to the English carriage houses that impressed the Wellborns on their trips to the UK.
This Thing's Got a Hemi
23 In Fact. Inside Tim Wellborn's Hemi Heaven, an English carriage house where Dodge does the interior decorating.
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