Hello Kansas City, welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement Podcast. We are so glad that you joined us here today. We are incredibly blessed because we get to sit at the feet of Thomas Thill, the founder of Bespoke Automotive Refinement and truly the number one Kansas City car detailing expert.
Today we’re going to be talking about to you abuot Kansas City car detailing luxury versus cheap cars or maybe just the everyday man’s car. Something that I did not know when we met was the level of cars that are out there in the world. If you would have asked me before I probably would have said the most expensive car out there is a million dollars.
Now that would be drivable cars. I know that just like with paintings you can have something that’s worth more than the value that it brings necessarily, but you have completely opened my eyes to the world of cars. Can you tell us a little bit about what kind of cars you work with on a day-to-day basis? What’s the variety that you see? And then we’ll kind of unpack this concept even more.
Well, I work on everything from cars that you get in every day and you take your kids to school and drop them off and then drive to work in. So like Toyota Camrys, Jeep Wranglers, Ford Torses. Today I worked on a Range Rover which is, you know, just a regular SUV in my eyes.
And then I work on cars that are concourse cars that get shipped all over the country to be taken to shows and be judged on their fit and finish. And then I work on super cars that are either sitting in a collection that never get driven or cars that are driven very hard on spirited drives, road rallies. I work on street racers cars.
That’s actually kind of how I got my name was working on street racers cars. Working on cars that were literally out running from the cops and breaking the laws. So everything in between.
So what has been the most expensive car that you’ve worked on for Kansas City car detailing? The most expensive car that I’ve worked on would be a Ferrari F40 LM which stands for Le Mans. That was about a five and a half million dollar car. That was the magazine car that went on.
It was in Motor Trend, Car and Driver, Track Magazine. It was in a ton of magazines. It was the car that Ferrari used to test their carbon ceramic brakes from Brembo.
So Brembo actually shipped this car to the Nurburgring and it lapped on the Nord Schlecht. And now when you buy a factory Ferrari and it has carbon ceramic brakes on it by Brembo, the car that I worked on was the car that Ferrari used to test these brakes on. So that’s the most expensive car I’ve ever worked on and it’s an extremely special one.
Now before we unpack this even further, can you share with us a little bit one of the number one push backs maybe you get from somebody who’s brought a five million dollar car or a one million dollar car, $250,000. They have a brand new car, they’re very excited about it and you pull out the flashlight on your phone and point out all of the places that need to be fixed. Can you actually work on brand new cars and what specifically would you work on for a brand new car that you wouldn’t need on a used one? You know, the first story that comes to mind, I was at a supercar meet during the summer.
This Kansas City car detailing service would have been back in like July. And there was a gentleman there that had just purchased a brand new Ferrari SF90 Stradale, about a million dollar car. And he had ordered this one-off spec paint job that was like one-on-one.
It was like this medium to dark lime green, like a medium lime green. And one of my clients went and got him and said, you need to have Thomas look at this. And I introduced myself to the guy and he said, well it’s a brand new car, it has 700 miles on it, shouldn’t he have a paint correction? And I went and looked at all of the ducts and body lines and I found orange peels and I found areas where the car had been sanded from the factory and not finished out completely.
It’s actually a very common thing on high-end vehicles that are hand-painted is, you know, a Ford, Dodge, Chevy, Jeep, all of the brands that you see on the road every day, those are painted by robots. So they’re perfect. Not necessarily in terms of orange peel, but they don’t have imperfections versus a hand-painted car that is hand-finished, hand-sanded, and then polished by a human being before it leaves the factory.
The reality is they can’t spend an entire week perfecting the paint on a Ferrari when they’re building, I think they build a hundred Ferraris a month. So they can’t spend a week per car. So it’s very common on a brand new supercar and even hypercar to find imperfections.
I remember I was at an event in Houston, TX2K, if you’re a street racer this is a little bit of a wink to you, but I used to go there every year and there was this middle eastern prince who had shipped in five cars. He shipped in a McLaren P1, he shipped in a Pagani Huayra, a Koenigsegg Agera 121, a Ferrari LaFerrari, and a Porsche 918 Spyder. I just named off like 15 million dollars worth of cars right now.
And just for the hell of it, I walked around the cars with my light and found imperfections on every single one. Um, sanding marks that have been missed from the factory. When I lived in Wichita about five years ago, I worked on a Pagani Zonda, and if it was in Kansas City, I would love to add this to the list of Kansas City car detailing services.
And it was, this car was shipped in from Sweden. The owner’s brother owned the car, just wanted to ship it over to the United States to have for a few months while he was visiting. And I had the pleasure of working on it and I noticed a ton of sanding scratches in the finish.
And this was an all carbon fiber car, so no paint, just full carbon and it had sanding scratches in it everywhere. So no matter how much you spend on a car, I can guarantee you if it’s brand new and it was hand painted, it’s got imperfections in the paint. So something else that I’ve learned in the process of getting to know you is yes, you can buy a car to get from point A to point B. You can get a car or a truck for work and it has a certain purpose.
But also, you can also get a car that you don’t drive and you put into a garage and it increases in value as an investment. Can you tell me a little bit about what are some good purchases that you’ve seen people do by just buying a car and keeping it as an investment? The best car to have bought would have been about 25 years ago. 20-25 years ago was the McLaren F1.
That car was about $800,000 and when it came out, it was the fastest car in the world. That car now is worth between $15-20 million. That’s a big increase.
It’s a huge increase and at one point, they dropped as low as $500,000. My client who owned the Ferrari F40 LM, Chris, bought the car at the absolute bottom of the market when those cars, they were just viewed as a track car, not something that you could really, you could drive it on the street, but it was extremely harsh to drive. There was nothing about it that was luxurious.
It was like driving a race car on the road. He paid $380,000 for that car and he sold it for $5.5 million. He raced it.
He didn’t buy it to sit in a garage. He’s actually the reason that that car was tested by Brembo because he was just racing it at a track and a Brembo rep was there. They wanted to test their new brakes, these new carbon ceramic brakes on the car.
That was the first ever, the only Ferrari F40 to ever have carbon ceramic brakes before they became a mainstream thing. That was the first factory Ferrari to ever have carbon ceramic brakes on it. If somebody is wanting to work with you, whether it’s in the Kansas City area or maybe some even live somewhere else and they want to fly you out, how would they get a hold of you? Well, you can reach out to me at 620-282-0402.
That’s my personal cell, or you can go online to bespokerefinement.com. I have a gallery of all of the cars that I’ve worked on. I also have all of my packages broken down. You can see all the different Kansas City car detailing packages and services that we offer.