Back when rally was truly starting to get serious, we had the Group-B cars. The pinnacle of engineering at the time, developing 4WD systems that are still envied today. The homologation rules back then meant that the public were able to purchase a road-going car that was a lot closer to the race spec than what you will find today.
This car just recently landed from Japan, where it was clearly owned by somebody who was wanting to hold onto it for quite some time.
It is a great example of the car, one that has been made even better with some careful paint correction and a whole lot of cleaning. At only 55K kms young, there was still a decent amount of cleanup to be done.
The brief on this job was to perform a minimal amount of correction, whilst keeping in mind the car is going to be further restored back to original spec/condition and could possibly be shown as such. This required a “concours-lite” approach, with the bulk of the work going into cleaning vs paint correction. The paint correction was performed as a single stage correction that finished down to a near-perfect result. If the owner decides to take this car to a full concours level, there is still room for further correction.
It’s not often you get such reflections on a white panel (especially in a non-fabricated environment)!
Here is the soot buildup in the engine bay.
Cleanup here was taken care of with Final Inspection’s Cleanse STRONG.
Some quite heavy scratching on the rear hatch, right in front of the wing. These areas were corrected by hand due to the tight space constraints.
Much crisper now.
Here’s an example of the typical paint condition of the whole vehicle.
Corrected with a single pass for a nice clean finish.
More cleaning was performed in the door jambs. Cleanse STRONG and Jaffa (diluted to 10% strength) were the weapons of choice here.
No place was safe from the soot. Although this was one of the cleaner areas on the car.
That dash is to die for. Purposeful gauges & lights. Sometimes when function leads form, beautiful things can happen…
Factory door wraps are still in place.
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