About

Joey Riley

Joey Riley was born in Dallas, Texas in 1970. He was raised in a family of “do-it-yourselfers” –  something that required some mechanical ingenuity. As a child, he would help his dad work on trucks and equipment for the family business, which sparked his interest in cars. In 1975, at five years old, Joey started racing.  His first car was a Quarter Midget. He had the nicest car on the track, taking second place in North Texas his first year. Moving forward, he started racing Motocross, but his love was always cars. Starting from the age of ten, he bought broken go-karts and motorcycles, repaired them, and sold them on the weekends. This passion carried over into his high school years where he built custom audio systems and lowered trucks in his area.

After graduating high school in 1988, Joey continued his education on an art scholarship. He later pursued a full-time job working on aircraft and excelled quickly to become a specialist in carbon materials on the Stealth Bomber and C17. Joey went on to specialize in automotive restoration working for a private collector.

In his early 20s, Joey opened his own shop restoring classic cars, which then led to opening a shop in the United Kingdom where he imported and exported vintage European sports cars. After 9/11, he went back to working on aircraft. It was at that point that he was offered a job at Unique Performance specializing in high performance muscle cars. From there he started working on Shelbys, which in turn prompted him to operate on a production of cars designed by Chip Foose. The experience he had from Unique Performance took him to a new level of building cars.  During the four years he worked with Unique, he ended up on a few episodes of the TLC show Rides.  Additionally, he was entered into build-off competitions in California and show-cased cars in Barrett Jackson all over the country.

Unique Performance is where Joey first met Rory. After the company was forced out of business, Unique customers asked if Joey and Rory could build the vehicles that weren’t delivered, so the duo teamed up.  Within a few weeks of leaving Unique Performance, Joey and Rory were approached by Carroll Shelby and invited to a meeting in Vegas. This meeting was the starting point of Riley Performance, a solution to the Shelby customers whose cars were never sent out. Shelby granted them the license to build Shelbys. With no money in their pockets, Joey and Rory started building hot rods and Shelbys and completing a 69 Foose Camaro as well. Since then, they have been working on building custom cars in the North Texas area. Their cars are second-to-none and have won various awards globally.