Exhibition Preparation

The standard for 80s and 90s metal

Judging at a car show happens in the places you can't see from five feet away. Most owners focus on the wax, but judges look for road salt residue on suspension arms or oil mist on the lower engine block. At our Bristol workshop on Queens Square, we treat these cars as historical objects. We spent 14 hours on a 1988 911 last August just cleaning the wheel arches and renewing the factory-style wax protection. We don't use harsh chemicals that strip the original plating off the bolts. Instead, we use workshop-grade brushes and mild solvents to keep the car period-correct.

Removing decades of storage grime

Many supercars from the 90s have spent years in humid garages. This leaves a dull film on the paint and oxidation on the magnesium or aluminium engine parts. We start by documenting every square inch of the car. Since 2017, we have tracked how different factory paints react to modern polish. For a typical project, we spend about 4 hours on the engine bay alone. We use factory blueprints to ensure we don't disturb delicate wiring looms or vacuum lines that often become brittle with age. By the time we finish, the textures of the plastic, rubber, and metal match how they looked when the car left the dealership.

Paint correction without thinning the coat

The paint on an F40 or a Diablo is thin compared to modern cars. You only get one or two chances to polish them before you hit the primer. We use ultrasonic depth gauges to measure the paint thickness at 83 different points on the bodywork. This tells us exactly how much we can safely buff. To be upfront, we'll say no if the paint is too thin for a full correction. It's better to have a car with a few light swirls than a car that needs a full respray because someone got greedy with a machine polisher. Our goal is to fix the 23% of defects that catch the light, not to ruin the car's history.

Undercarriage and final presentation

A car on a show stand is often viewed from low angles. We put every vehicle on our 2-post lift to scrub the floor pans and suspension components. We've found that 12 of the last 15 cars we prepped had significant dirt trapped behind the plastic arch liners. We remove these liners, clean the hidden metal, and reinstall them using the correct fasteners. It's a slow process, but it works. Since we started this specific service in 2021, 37 of the cars we handled ended up on the podium at regional events. We provide a full folder of photos showing the work, which helps with the car's provenance and future value.

Booking and scheduling for the show season

We only take on two exhibition preps per month because of the physical toll and the space required in the workshop. If you have an event in July, we usually need to see the car in May for an initial inspection. This 20-minute check lets us see if we need to order any specific clips or period-correct fluids from our global parts network. We give you a fixed-fee estimate after that inspection so there are no surprises when the final bill arrives. Heads-up: the workshop gets busy from March onwards, so reaching out early is usually the best move.