WAYNE CARINI OF CHASING CLASSIC CARS
“I’m 66 now, going on 18, and I am excited about getting my new Dodge Demon,” says Wayne Carini, the star of the popular TV show Chasing Classic Cars. “I’ve got my order in. They’ve got 840 horsepower from the factory and will do wheelies. They will pull the front wheels off the ground and into the air. I want to put my young grandson in the passenger seat and pull wheelies and have him experience that - on private land, of course. In 1971 I built a Pontiac Firebird with a 400 horsepower GTO engine. It had no interior apart from the driver’s seat and I used to drag race it over on the local turnpike. There was a kid with a ’63 Dodge Dart and it had a Hemi in it and he would lift the left front wheel right off the ground, it had so much torque. I thought, ‘that is the coolest thing in the world’ and now Dodge has come out with a car that you can drive on the street and yet can pull the wheels off the ground.”
Well, it’s good to see that Wayne is still young at heart. In the TV show we usually see him buying, selling and restoring mega-expensive collector cars such as Ferraris, Cadillacs, Packards and Bentleys, but he has a real passion for hot rods, specials and oddball cars, as well as drag racing, F1, Nascar and motorcycles. Wayne grew up around cars as his father Robert was a highly regarded car restorer, operating out of a barn on the family farm in Connecticut. Robert started by restoring Model A Fords and in 1952 co-founded the Model A Restorers’ Club of
