Hey guys, welcome back to the Bespoke Automotive Refinement Podcast, Kansas City’s number one one-stop shop for Kansas City auto detailing services. I’m Thomas Thill, I’m the owner and the founder of Bespoke Automotive Refinement, and today we’re going to be talking about a very controversial topic. It’s something that has come up a lot in my career with auto detailing and my circle of friends in the auto detailing world and in the racing world.
So, a little bit of my background. My favorite hobby outside of detailing cars is racing, more specifically drag racing. I’ve done everything from street racing, I’ve attended TX2K, which is a very famous street racing event in Houston, Texas.
I’ve done that for four years. I’ve done standing half mile, shift sector events, airstrip attack events, and a lot of quarter mile drag racing, bracket racing, heads up. I’ve done a lot of drag racing in my life, and obviously being around that crowd of people and doing what I do for a living, I’m always met with the same conflict whenever I’m talking to people about wanting their cars done.
A lot of guys that have, we’re going to air quote here, race cars, and what defines a race car? It’s a car that you race. I mean, you can have a Honda Civic that runs 14 second quarter miles, and if you race it, in my mind, it’s a race car. But I have a lot of guys that have come up to me and said, you know, man, I’d really love to pay the money to have you do a full paint correction and ceramic coating on my race car, but I mean, what’s the point of making this car so pretty and perfect and putting a ceramic coating on it if it’s just a race car? I’ll tell you, I have the perfect analogy for anyone that’s considering doing a paint correction and ceramic coating on any race car.
If they’re on the fence about it, I’m going to push you off the fence with this, and I’m going to push you over into team paint correction and ceramic coating and have you join the dark side and have one of our Kansas City auto detailing services performed on your race car. So in particular, we’re going to talk about ceramic coating. So about two years ago, I received a phone call from a client who never had any of this type of work done before, and they’d seen an ad on Facebook, and they had a full-blown NHRA drag racing team.
I mean, this guy had everything from pro stock, super stock, modified. He had a full- blown NHRA race team set up, and he reached out to me because he was running these Copo Camaros, and he was interested in making the paint look better, but he was on the fence because they were race cars. And so I went out to his facility, took a look at these cars, and I quickly figured out that we were going to be a great fit because these cars on the outside, so on the rear fenders, were caked in track prep tire rubber residue and all sorts of oils.
And his first car, I said, I’ll tell you what, drag racing is all about the game of weight reduction. Watch this. I spent almost two hours getting tire rubber, track prep, and just grime off of this car, and it ended up equaling out to four pounds of prep and tire rubber caked onto the exterior of this car.
And, I mean, that alone paid off for him because he picked up, that’s four extra pounds that he just lost, and when you’re talking about a drag car that’s bracket racing, any little weight reduction that you can achieve is the difference between winning and losing. So after I get this done, you know, we end up doing a paint correction on the car, get it looking perfect again, and he asked me, he said, well, how do I prevent this, this track prep and tire rubber to sticking to the exterior so it doesn’t weigh the car down again? And we ended up putting, we went a little bit over the top with this one, but the Kansas City Auto Detailing package that we ended up performing on this car was a three-layer ceramic coating. So we ended up putting three layers of ceramic coating on this race car.
Again, kind of overkill, but these race cars get beat up on, they get put through the worst of the worst when it comes to, you know, burnouts and track prep and road tar just being slung all over the car. So we ended up putting three layers of ceramic coating on this car. And I said, tell you what, go ahead and run this car at this event and see how much easier this one is to keep clean versus your other cars that don’t have this protection on them.
And they had a mobile washing service that traveled with them to detail these cars. And after they got back from that second event, he ended up hiring our Kansas City Auto Detailing services to come back to his facility and perform this on all of his race cars. Because not only were we actually helping with the weight reduction on getting this road tar and track prep off of these cars, but we were also making them easier to keep clean so they could keep the weight down.
So in the future, if you’re thinking about or considering having a race car paint corrected and ceramic coated, or even just detailed, one thing to keep in mind is it’s going to be easier to keep clean if you have a drag car. We’re going to get all the road tar, excuse me, tire rubber off of it. We’re going to get all the track prep off of it.
And we have so many different Kansas City Auto Detailing services tailored to making your race car look like not only a showroom car, but it’s going to be easier to keep clean after putting it through its paces, after running it down the track 10-15 times in a weekend. And honestly, above all else, how awesome is it to show up at the track and have a car that you’re beating everyone with, that also has the paint finish of a show car? I mean, it doesn’t even get any better than that. If you’re a car guy, you want your car to look good.
At the end of the day, that’s a big deal. So guys, thank you so much for tuning in to the Bespoke Automotive Refinements podcast. We’re the number one rated Kansas City Auto Detailing service servicing Kansas City and the surrounding areas.