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Jay Pettit is quite blasé about old rare Mopars: “Through various friends owning them I’ve grown up around some really nice cars. It sounds big headed,” he admits, “but I’ve seen so many rare Hemi cars and Superbirds they almost seem normal to me.” Jay bought his first American car when he was just 17 years old. “It was a right-hand drive 1967 Barracuda fastback that came with a straight-six, pretty soon we’d dropped a cheap 440 into it and I took it drag racing. That was in the late Eighties and it was a 12-second car. Mates with British sports cars or hot hatches would be boasting about having fast cars and I’d take them out in the Barracuda and terrify them.”

Jay became friends with Ernie Wright, an acknowledged muscle car expert. “Ernie always has interesting cars in his workshop and being an apprentice trained by Chrysler in the Seventies he’s always helped me out with, say, tuning a Six-Pack