In case you haven't figured it out yet, the supercar lifestyle is a little bit different than the typical car enthusiast lifestyle. You might road trip your Ford Mustang, or your BMW M3, or if you're more upscale, your Porsche 911 Carrera. You'll certainly give it a nice wash after the trip, but will you go through a seven-step process involving three different soaps just to clean the paint?
That's what the team at Topaz Detailing does. We've seen their handiwork before, as they specialize in a wide range of cleaning, detailing, and paint protection services. All measures of supercars and hypercars come into the shop, but the crew still appears legitimately starstruck with the arrival of a very rare and exceedingly valuable McLaren F1.
Taking Care Of Supercars:
It's one thing to even see an F1 outside a climate-controlled garage, never mind seeing it with actual grime on the exterior. Apparently, the owner of this F1 road-tripped it to Spa where he drove his Ferrari race car in a GT3 challenge – and won – then took the F1 back home. Presumably, the owner is based in the UK since Topaz Detailing has shops in London and Bristol, so the McLaren did actually get rather gunked up on the drive to and from Belgium. Such is the supercar lifestyle.
How does the F1 get clean? The process opens with a thorough rinse to clear any easy-to-remove crud. A wheel cleaning comes next, followed by the first cleaner application to the entire car, which is a degreaser. Once rinsed, a soft brush with soap is used to clean tricky crevices such as vents and around badges, followed by yet another rinse. Next is a thick covering of something called snow foam that, once again, is rinsed without any scrubbing. Finally comes the shampoo, which involves a hand mitt with more soap to clear the stubborn stuff. A final rinse and dry completes the wash.
It's certainly an involved process, but there's no denying the hypercar is very clean when all is said and done. Is it overkill? Perhaps a better question is whether there's such a thing as detailing overkill when cleaning an iconic machine worth $15 million.
Source: Topaz Detailing via Road & Track
