From Bad-Ass 300 to Badassador

Some origin stories start with a pivotal moment, a single flash of inspiration that changes everything. Jack Rimbo’s began more gradually, with a Chrysler 300 company car, a father with a lead foot, and what an eight-year-old boy interpreted as the fastest car on the planet in the mid-2000s.

It was 2005, and Jack’s father had just been issued a brand-new 300C with a 5.7 HEMI^® engine as his company car. For young Jack and his siblings, the real entertainment wasn’t the leather interior or the stylish grille; it was the moment their father put his foot to the floor and launched the car. Strapped into the back seat, the kids would brace themselves as their father hammered the throttle and took off down the road. To an eight-year-old, those pulls felt like warp speed, like the whole world was rushing past in a blur. Jack was hooked before he knew what “hooked or HEMI” meant.

Like most kids, Jack spent his early years collecting Hot Wheels and playing video games, but the 300C planted a love of cars, and more specifically, HEMI engine-powered cars, deep inside him. When he reached high school, he was driving a forgettable daily, something reliable, something boring, and saving every dollar he could to buy something he could, as he puts it, “be slightly irresponsible with.” He was on his way to pick up a GTO when the deal went sideways. Frustrated but undeterred, he headed home empty-handed. That’s when his father dropped the news: the company was upgrading him to a newer 300C. The old one, the 2005 Chrysler that had sparked everything, was available. Jack dove into his savings and bought it on the spot.

It was 2015. Jack was 18, fresh out of high school, and suddenly behind the wheel of the car that had defined speed for him as a child. But there was a tiny problem. His family wasn’t made up of card-carrying gearheads. They tolerated his enthusiasm for things that go fast, but they didn’t share it entirely. That didn’t stop Jack. He’d been tinkering with things since he was a youngen. Breaking them, reassembling them incorrectly, driving his mother crazy by taking apart furniture just to see how it went back together. Now he had a car, and he treated it the same way he’d treated everything else, as a puzzle waiting to be solved, improved, reimagined.

“I started playing with all the crazy mods,” Jack admits, laughing at the memory. “Now I look back, and I’m like, what were you doing? But you know, I was 18. I hadn’t developed my true taste for mods yet.”

There were Plasti-dipped wheels. AutoZone badges. A wing that probably shouldn’t have been there. And yes, underglow. Jack took the 300C apart in his parents’ garage, sometimes during blizzards, forcing his folks to park outside in the snow while he swapped wheels or installed lights.

But the story doesn’t end there, because young Jack with a fast car did what young people with fast cars often do: he got into trouble. After a year of ownership, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, carrying THE WRONG amount of speed. Shortly after that, he crashed the car in the rain on a set of slicks. The 2005 300C was totaled.

His parents, understandably, had conditions when they handed him the insurance money. Buy something reliable. Buy something SLOW. Jack bought a 1997 Ram 1500 with a 5.9. Slow, sure, and reliable enough. And then, secretly, he bought a 2007 Chrysler 300 SRT8 with a 6.1-liter HEMI engine and stashed it at a friend’s house.

His father knew. They went together to buy the car, but they kept it from his mother the entire time. Sorry, Mom! I was told the statute of limitations had hopefully run out on this one. Jack started accumulating parts for the SRT8 soon after picking it up. Aftermarket front and rear bumpers imported from overseas, and an air suspension setup. But life got complicated. A few things kept him from working on the car the way he wanted to, so he compensated by working more and buying more parts, just so he could look at them and imagine what the build would become. The 300 sat in storage for years, untouched, while Jack sorted out who he was and what he wanted the car and himself to be.

After a handful of years sorting everything out, the SRT8 300 was still sitting there waiting for modification, and Jack was itching to get back behind the wheel of something fast. In January 2020, he walked into a dealership and bought a B5 Blue Dodge Challenger Scat Pack. He told himself he’d keep it stock, that this time would be different. Three days later, he had slicks on it. A week after that, coilovers. Then a Redeye hood. Then nitrous. The Challenger became his playground, and he dove into it the way he’d always dove into things, completely focused and with zero restraint.

But the Challenger wasn’t going to be just a cosmetic build. Jack wanted to go deeper, to understand the engine, to build something from the ground up. He bought internal parts for the motor, pistons, rods and a rotating assembly, but had no idea how any of it really worked. He started calling machine shops for quotes to assemble the engine, and they all came back on the high end. Then he ran into an old friend from his first 300C days, a guy named Trenton Teter who had his own machine shop.

“Trent was like, ‘Hey, dude, why don’t you just come to the shop and I’ll help you? We can do it together,'” Jack remembers. “So I did. And I’ve worked there ever since.”

Teter Automotive gave Jack more than a place to work. It’s given him an education. He learned to machine cylinder heads, port and polish, surface and bore. He built his first complete engine. The one still running in his Challenger today, pushing well over 1,000 horsepower on twin turbos when the tune is set to kill. The car has been through countless iterations: different wraps, different suspension setups, different power levels. At one point, Jack even invented his own signature look, turbo halos! He wanted to mount the turbos where the headlights used to be, but the opening needed something. He had a set of 4-inch LED halos left over from a headlight build and realized they fit perfectly over the turbo compressor housings. He held them in place with turbo guards, and just like that, he had a look no one else had.

“That really picked up the popularity of the car,” Jack says. “The turbo halos are definitely one of the key features that give it that menacing look.”

Along the way, Jack also figured out social media. His girlfriend at the time had a following, and she helped him understand social algorithms, posting schedules and the right hashtags. They made a viral video together, Jack spraying her with water at a car wash, her acting surprised, the whole thing perfectly staged. It hit 5+ million views. From there, Jack just kept going, building his following while building his cars.

The Badassador program came through a friend who kept sending Jack opportunities. First, it was the Chief Donut Maker contest, which didn’t pan out. Then it was the Badassador program. Jack signed up immediately. He’s pure Dodge and Mopar_® through and through, and the idea of representing the brand he loves made perfect sense. He still has the 300 SRT8 in storage, now rescued from mice and fire damage and slowly coming back to life. He still has the Challenger, now in matte PPF and making absurd power. And he’s still at Teeter Automotive, doing the work he fell in love with. Taking things apart, putting them back together, making them better than they were before.

Jack’s next goal is simple: finish the collection. A Viper. A Magnum. Maybe a TRX. All built his way, all part of the same story that started in the back seat of a 2005 300C when his dad hit the gas and an eight-year-old boy decided he wanted to go that fast forever.

“Cars are endless,” Jack says. “You can’t own them all. You could own two of the same ones, and they could be two different styles, and you’d still want a third. It never ends.”

For Jack Rimbo, that’s not a problem. That’s the whole point.

Follow Jack on his social channels: YouTube, Instagram & TikTok