Detail demon: the 138-hour professional detail of a McLaren F1 GT-R LT

4 October, 2016

So you like cleaning your car on the weekends? Do you use two buckets? That’s cute — these lads just completed a 138-hour detail. Four professional, efficient detailers taking 138 hours as a team to complete the task.

Why, you ask? Larry Kosilla, Kevin Brown, Dan Miele, and Joseph Torbati detailed this 1997 McLaren F1 GT-R LT for the Quail Concours on August 19 in California, and even managed to win the Spirit of the Quail award, which is awarded to the vehicle that best represents the true spirit of motoring.

If you’re keen to see the folk hard at work, then check it out. This is an incredible channel to follow if you’re into detailing. 

Design accord

You can’t get much more of an art deco car than a Cord — so much so that new owners, Paul McCarthy and his wife, Sarah Selwood, went ahead and took their Beverly 812 to Napier’s Art Deco Festival this year, even though the festival itself had been cancelled.
“We took delivery of the vehicle 12 days before heading off to Napier. We still drove it all around at the festival,” says Paul.
The utterly distinctive chrome grille wrapping around the Cord’s famous coffin-shaped nose, and the pure, clean lines of the front wing wheel arches, thanks to its retractable headlamps, are the essence of deco. This model, the Beverly, has the finishing touch of the bustle boot that is missing from the Westchester saloon.

Motorman: When New Zealand built the Model T Ford

History has a way of surrounding us, hidden in plain sight. I was one of a group who had been working for years in an editorial office in Augustus Terrace in the Auckland city fringe suburb of Parnell who had no idea that motoring history had been made right around the corner. Our premises actually backed onto a century-old brick building in adjacent Fox Street that had seen the wonder of the age, brand-new Model T Fords, rolling out the front door seven decades earlier.
Today, the building is an award-winning two-level office building, comprehensively refurbished in 2012. Happily, 6 Fox Street honours its one time claim to motoring fame. Next door are eight upmarket loft apartments, also on the site where the Fords were completed. Elsewhere, at 89 Courtenay Place, Wellington, and Sophia Street, Timaru, semi-knocked-down Model Ts were also being put together, completing a motor vehicle that would later become known as the Car of the Century.