Priceless Bugatti

What do you do when you need to prep an incredibly valuable and rare car for the largest industry trade show in the world? You call in one of the best guys in the business, Derek Bemiss of Detail Werks, to get the job done. Derek also happens to be the man who takes care of Barry Meguiar's personal cars, and as you can imagine Barry knows a thing or two about how paint should look. Now, when your boss leans over to you during a totally unrelated meeting and asks if you're available on a certain day to head up to the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA to help out with the prep, what do you do? Well, you try really hard to contain your excitement (you are in a formal meeting, after all) and casually reply "sure, I can make time for that."

The car in question is a Bugatti, but not one of the current crop of high dollar and even higher speed engineering marvels. No, it's a one of a kind, 1939 Vanvooren bodied Type 57C that was a gift from the French Government to the Prince of Persia (later the Shah of Iran) on the occasion of his wedding. And it's worth a whole heck of a lot more than those brand new Veyrons are, that's for sure. Heck, it's worth more than a whole fleet of Veyrons, truth be told. Here's a bit of background on the car from the Petersen Museum:

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the former Prince and heir to the throne as Shah of Iran, received this striking supercharged Bugatti as a gift from the French government on the occasion of his first wedding. The dramatic body was constructed by Vanvooren of Paris in the style of Figoni et Falaschi, one of the most progressive coachbuilders of the day.

Advanced features include fully skirted fenders, a top that conceals beneath a metal panel when down, and a windshield that can be lowered into the cowl by means of a hand crank mounted under the dashboard. Bugatti contributed a Type 57C chassis that came equipped with a supercharger that helped the car produce 175 horsepower (130kW) from a 3245cc (198 cu in) engine.

In 1959, the Bugatti was sold out of the Shah's Imperial Garage for a sum equivalent to approximately 275 US dollars. It was subsequently owned by a succession of Bugatti enthusiasts, but never publicly shown until after receiving a complete restoration in 1983. It is now in the collection of Margie and Robert E. Petersen at the Petersen Automotive Museum.

So, with that in mind, we headed up to the Petersen Museum early on a Wednesday morning to work on the car in no less impressive a setting than the so called "Vault" of the museum, their underground garage where restorations and repairs are done, and where dozens of cars are stored when not on display in the museum proper. What an experience!!!

Derek and Ryan (also of Detail Werks) are pros - they know how to do the job right and how to work quickly when they have to. And boy did we have to. Turns out we only had as much time to work on the car as the employees of the Vault had hours of the day in their shift. Fortunately for us, they had to work a couple of extra hours that day so we had a bit more time that we normally would have. Still, at the end of it all we would have loved another full day to experiment a bit, but such is life. You do what you gotta do in the time allotted, so there was no time to mess around. We had work to do.

A couple of experiments with tool, pad and product gave us some insight into what were up against (besides the clock, that is). The car had been restored in the 1980s and was holding up quite well. Still, the severity of the defects meant we would need to be somewhat aggressive when polishing certain areas, but we didn't want to get too aggressive. After all, this is the only such car in existence and it's just crazy valuable. Our first test was M205 on a yellow foam polishing pad. That got rid of the swirls pretty quickly, but the deeper marks were fading very slowly. With time being a factor we stepped things up a bit and put M205 on microfiber finishing pads with the Rupes 21 Bigfoot. That ate the defects but left the paint a bit hazy.

Ryan was the master of detailing the interior and all the fine brightwork on the exterior. His attention to detail is amazing - there was so much trim on this car, with so many tight areas, that he spent as much time working on all that as Derek and I did working on the major body panels to correct the paint defects.

We accidentally discovered something really interesting with the behavior of this paint: As mentioned earlier, we were seeing some hazing with M205 on the microfiber finishing pads. We were using a very small amount of product and only light to moderate pressure. Until we came upon a deeper scratch that needed a bit more punch to remove. So we upped the tool speed a bit, increased the pressure a bit, and voila! No more scratch. But also virtually no haze. That was a bit of a surprise - more speed, more pressure, a nicer finish. Go figure. So we adapted our technique a bit and carried on.

We decided to top everything off with Gold Class Carnauba Plus paste wax. Done. And just gleaming. Such a work of art, and such a privilege to work on!

A great car, a very cool setting, and a couple of supremely talented guys to work with. Detailing just doesn't get much better! We can't thank these guys enough for helping us prepare this incredible vehicle for SEMA. The car is a fairly radical departure for SEMA but it definitely turned heads at the show. Meguiar's is once again the official car care products supplier to the Petersen Museum, so having this car in our booth at SEMA was a celebration of that partnership, and also a great way to highlight our product line.