2004 Mercury Marauder
This nasty vehicle belongs to the person who built my website. I've detailed his DD before, and did a quick cleanup on this one last fall before he put it away for the winter. He moved to Ohio from Florida last year, and was a customer of Todd Helme of Bella Macchina while he lived down there (I guess he prefers to have his cars detailed by guys named Todd!).
This is a highly modified car, and unless you have an equally modified (and lighter weight) vehicle, you do not want to line up against it. It's got a different block, crank, rods, pistons, cams, supercharger, suspension components, transmission mods, ported and polished head, etc, etc, etc. At the wheels on pump gas he's putting out 542hp and 522lb/ft of torque! You definitely need power like this to propel such a large vehicle to a 11.6 second quarter mile. He ended up having some mechanical issues at the track that kept him from more runs. With a little more tuning, he feels he can drop that time down a bit more.
This car is BIG...really big! There was by far more surface area on this car than any other I've worked on. The trunk lid was bigger than most hoods...
OK, now for a little fun. This video was taken just the other day at a local track day. Check it out:
DRAG RACE VIDEO!
After watching the video, you get a good feel for what this car is all about (that Mustang wasn't stock either!).
Now for the reality. Those pre-staging smoky burnouts sure look cool, but they leave an awful mess. He sprayed down the back end of the car with a product designed to help the rubber come off easier, but I have to say that it failed! More on that in a bit...
Rubber (more like tar) was on the body, all over the exhaust, in the wheel well, on the suspension components, etc.
The owner does a fantastic job taking care of this car, so it was in pretty good condition. It had it's share of swirls and RIDS since it had been 2 years since Todd Helme worked on it, but not bad at all.
When the car arrived...right off the track!
First up were the wheels. As always, I start off by spraying down the wheels (one side of the vehicle at a time) with P21S Wheel Gel. As it is dwelling to break down the grime, I spray P21S TAW on the wheel wells and tires.
Now take your brush and bend it so you can access the backside of the spokes.
I have the new smaller E-Z Detail brush to get into the tighter areas:
Now for the fun part! Like I said before, the rubber was everywhere. I used a variety of cleaners and tools to remove it, and found that a plastic razor blade was the best for getting it off of the rear quarter panel. Here's a pic while I was still in process...P21S TAW is being used here to clean up the frame and suspension components.
The tar-like rubber came off in small chunks, and because it was so sticky, it ended up everywhere...my face, arms, legs, clothes (ruined!), on my shoes, on every cleaner bottle, the hose, my tripod, and then tracked into the garage and subsequently into the house (my wife was pumped about that!). I still have a date with some solvent to clean up the floors. For his next track day he's going to tape everything up with blue painter's tape so the removal process will be much easier.
Now that the wheels were done, I foamed the car with Chemical Guys Wash & Clear at paint prep ratio to remove any wax on the surface. I then clayed with
Clay Magic using Optimum No Rinse as lube.
Linear Mode
