I had the good fortune to be selected by Meguiar's to be part of their Ford SEMA Team this year, so I spent last week at SEMA on Meguiar's dime and got paid to boot. Meguiar's has been contracted by Ford for the past several years to prep and maintain all the Ford display vehicles, but this year we also had to manage the vehicles for CEC Wheels, which meant not only more work but the opportunity to detail some amazing cars...and I got to drive almost all of them as well!!! Lucky me!!

We had 5 guys to handle the prep on 58 vehicles in a day and a half, then 4 guys to maintain them through the week. But we had to deal with an additional 8 vehicles on Thursday for CEC Wheels, and that's when things got really interesting!

My schedule was something like this:

Sunday: arrive Las Vegas 2:30 PM and then complete 12 cars/trucks for the Ford booth by 10:00 PM
Monday: start at 7:00 AM to finish off the remaining 28 cars/trucks in the main Ford booth, 5 cars for Meguiar's in various locations, 5 more Ford vehicles outside, 8 vehicles for CEC Wheels in a completely different building (fortunately these were in pretty good shape), completed around 11:30 PM.
Tuesday: back at it by 7:30 AM just to make sure everything is 100% for the show opening at 9:00 AM, then spend the rest of the day dusting down all the cars in 1 hour shifts. Finish the day with a final go-round of everything.
Wednesday: same as Tuesday but now climbing up on the damn lifted 4x4 Ford F-350 Crew Cab pickups is getting tedious to say the least!!
Thursday: started like the last two days but then I got pulled out to the Bali Hai Country Club with one of the other guys to detail a group of 8 vehicles for the CEC Wheels Automobile Fashion Show. We were stuck working in the parking lot, in the sun, but it was nice to be out of the noise and crush of the convention center. Of course we had to re-clean all the cars from the CEC booth once they showed up at the country club since, well, they got dusty in the drive over! Later in the evening we had to stage them all so they were lined up to be driven through the fashion show (hosted and emceed by Tommy Kendall, multi time TransAm Champion) so I got to drive all the cars. Not for very long mind you, just a bit over a 1/4 mile through a parking lot, but the list of cars was just amazing!!! The partial list of what I got to detail and drive that day:

Unfortunately I could not get my hands on the Mercedes McLaren SLR 722 as Claus Ettensberger, the owner of both CEC Wheels and the 722, wouldn't let anyone else drive it. With only 25 of these in the U.S. and a price tag north of $500,000 I guess I can understand. I did get to detail it though!!

We got back to the Hilton just before midnight, grabbed some dinner, and headed to our rooms for some well deserved sleep.

Friday: back at it by 7:00 AM to clean up the CEC vehicles that were brought back to the booth and then our usual routine of wiping down cars scattered around the convention until the show closed that afternoon.

I've got a bunch of pictures uploaded HERE, broken out by category. Sort of.