I was asked to be part of a very select team to prep this car for our company booth at SEMA. It's a one of a kind Vanvooren bodied 1939 Bugatti Type 57C that was a gift from the French Government to the Prince of Persia (later Shah of Iran) for his wedding. The car is owned by the Petersen museum and is valued at $15-$20,000,000US. It was quite an honor to detail this beauty, but very upsetting to see the level of damage that we were faced with initially. We did the work in the Vault of the Petersen museum so we were surrounded by some pretty amazing cars - including Steve McQueen's Jaguar XKSS!





Hard at work!


The crew - that's yours truly center.


This is how the car looked in our booth at SEMA just a few days later.



Certainly one of the most beautiful cars I've ever had the pleasure to work on, and by a huge margin the most valuable!!

 

WOW - the way it reflects the lights, it looks like it is pin-stripped. Nice job!

 

Work of ART

 

Engine pictures please !!!!!

 

Engine pix - sorry for the delay!

It's a supercharged, 3245cc straight 8 making 175HP.

 

Thanks for the photos, Mike, that sure is beautiful.

One of my favorites is the atlantique coupe with the nearly circular doors, but I didn't realize any coach builders did a topless version.

I will be using my Meguire's 205, 105, and synthetic sealent on an older black truck my father purchased this weekend trying to get out some swirls and surface scratches. I wanted to thank you for all the tips and info you have posted, I feel I have read nearly all of it and know exactly how to tackle this thing.

 

That is absolutely stunning Mike! Can you share with us which Meguire's products and process you used?

 

This car was restored in the late 80's with single stage paint so the paint was fairly soft but it had some really nasty scratches in the surface. That meant we had to get a bit aggressive in order to remove the deeper scratches, but doing so also created some hazing in the paint. We also discovered this paint to be extremely sensitive to tool speed, pressure and amount of product used.

We started out with M205 Ultra Finishing Polish on a foam polishing pad, but it was slow to remove the worst of the defects. So we stepped up to microfiber finishing pads and that made a huge difference. We were using the new Rupes LHR21 Bigfoot buffers (essentially a DA buffer with a 21mm stroke, which is huge compared to the standard 8mm throw of all other DA buffers on the market) with a small amount of product - 3 pea sized drops on a fully primed pad, speed 4 on the tool and moderate pressure. That was working quite well, but with a fair bit of hazing, until I accidentally stumbled onto something: I needed to up the aggressiveness in order to remove a certain extra nasty scratch, so I bumped the tool up to speed 5 and increased the pressure, and not only was the scratch gone but the haze was almost gone, too! It sounds totally backwards, but on this paint it was magic!!

So we altered our technique to reflect this, and really held back on the amount of product used. Most people tend to use way too much product anyway, but we found on this paint that a very small amount gave the best result. We were running 6" pads for the bulk of the work, but moved to 3" pads on the Meguiar's G110v2 buffer for all the tighter areas on the car (around all the trim on the hood sides, between the front fenders and hood, etc). The slight amount of haze we did have after major correction was removed with the same M205 but on foam finishing pads for a very soft touch to the paint for that finish polish step. We even went over the chrome with M205, and used our consumer Gold Class Leather Cleaner & Conditioner on the interior. We topped off the paint with Gold Class Carnauba Plus paste wax.

What you can't see in the pictures is the true condition of the paint on the trunk - it really needs to be wet sanded and compounded to remove the excess texture, but we were not given enough time to do this - we had from about 7:30AM to 6:30PM to work on the car and we would have loved to have another couple of days to do some sanding and even experiment with some other bugging techniques. I would have loved to run some M205 on a foam finishing pad with a rotary buffer at very slow speed (600 rpm max) to really make the paint pop even more.

Paint polishing is a great example of the "law of diminishing returns" concept. It can take 30 man hours like we did on this car to get the paint to this point, which I would say was maybe 85-90%, and it can take as many man hours again to go from that to 95%. We simply weren't given the time we really wanted to do full justice to this car, so we did what we could to maximize our efficiency and the ultimate outcome. Given the time constraints, we were very happy with the end result.

 

My first thought was that the body was by Figoni & Falaschi. What a privilege to be asked to detail out this car. But why oh why was such a special, not to mention valuable, car not taken better care of? And secondly, why wait until almost the last minute to have it detailed?

But you obviously did an incredible job in such a short time frame. It was also very nice of you to include the details of the detailing (yes I know what I just said). While I use microfiber 'towels' to wipe off the excess polish, I've never heard of microfiber polishing pads. A DA buffer is an orbital buffer? If so, they scare me, but I do have a small one. I also would have been a major chicken when it came time to get aggressive. I'm glad it worked out for you. It really ruins my day when primer shows up.

I'll bet it really stood out at the SEMA show.

Biba

 

Yes, Vanvooren did this car in the style of Figoni et Falaschi, no doubt about it. You'd be amazed how hard it is on a car to spend time traveling from show to show and how poorly they often get treated at an event. You'd think the life of a trailer queen would be very easy on a car, but it's far from that. Waiting until the last minute for this sort of thing is, unfortunately, the nature of the beast. Not that that makes it any less frustrating at times, but it's what we deal with.
Yes, a DA buffer is essentially an orbital in that it both rotates and oscillates the pad, but the tools we used are far from the sort of 10" pad tools found at auto parts stores for $40. Those just don't have the power to do any real work and are really only good for applying wax, if that. The microfiber pads are something Meguiar's introduced about 3 years ago and they give a good DA buffer the cutting ability of a rotary, but without the very real potential for damage that a rotary can do in the hands of a novice. It's a great system, and it really proved its worth on this car. I've been doing this long enough, and on enough very expensive and rare cars, that I don't worry about burning through. I'm always extremely aware of what's going on and will pay very close attention to progress, preferring to take my time to get it right rather than just looking to get the job done as fast as possible. It's a bit of a balance, but on very expensive cars you err on the side of caution and take that extra bit of time, evaluating very closely as you go. But if you're using a "best practices" approach all the time, then it doesn't really matter if you're working on a $15,000,000 piece of art like this, or a used Toyota Corolla. You just get into the habit of paying very close attention.

The last shot in my original post is the car in our booth this year, just a few days after we detailed her. It got a lot of coverage though a wide variety of outlets. How could it not? It's a freakin' $15,000,000 Bugatti!!!

 

Thanks for the details Mike!