The goal for many when attending a car show is to find a good spot and quickly make your car ready for presentation. This way you can spend time with friends, walk around and look at other cars and eat some great food, or relax and answer questions and discuss your ride with other enthusiasts. Therefore you want to prepare your vehicle as much as possible in the days leading up to the show or even the night before. Just like we recommend cleaning wheels and tires first during a traditional Two Bucket Wash, cleaning the tires and wheels on a classic car for a car show is a logical first step in your detailing show prep.

For the wheels, you can give them a quick and safe cleaning with Waterless Wash and several waffle-weave Waterless Wash Towels. With the wheels cool to the touch, generously spray Waterless Wash onto the wheel surface, then gently wipe the spokes, center cap, lug nuts, and lip with a folded Waterless Wash Towel. As one side of the towel becomes dirty, flip it over to a new clean side - do not continue to use a dirty side of the towel to keep wiping the wheel, as that is how you can introduce scratches into delicate wheel finishes. Do not use these specific towels on the paint afterward unless you wash them first since they will have brake dust and other particles in them that can scratch paint. If the wheels have wide openings in between the spokes, reach as many areas of the inside barrel as you can. If there are tighter clearances for the inner barrel, you can wrap a Waterless Wash Towel over a Small Angled Wheel Brush and then clean the inner barrel in that manner. Then wrap a second dry Waterless Wash Towel (or a Mini Plush Drying Towel) around the Small Angled Wheel Brush to wipe up excess residue.

For the tires, you do not want to simply keep adding more and more layers of a tire dressing to try to temporarily hide brown discoloration. We’ve all seen a set of tires that look like a sticky mess from using too much tire shine, with tire shine speckles slung all of the sides of the vehicle, and you do not want your tires, doors, etc. looking like that. Take a folded Edgeless Utility Towel and spray several mists of Tire & Rubber Cleaner directly into the towel if your vehicle has shorter sidewalls, or spray directly onto the tire if the sidewalls have some height to them, then scrub the tire with the towel. As you scrub back and forth, you will notice large amounts of dirt and brown discoloration transferring into the towel, leaving your tire nice and bare. Use a dry part of the towel or a second Edgeless Utility Towel to wipe away any excess cleaner.

Once the wheels and tires are dry (and after you have finished cleaning all other areas of the vehicle), apply your preferred tire product on each tire to allow it to soak in and dry overnight. Our Tire Shine will provide more of a higher gloss look, whereas VRT or Graphene Tire Dressing will leave the tires with more of a dark black satin sheen, so it comes down to personal preference of how you want the tires to look. Very glossy tires can sometimes take away the focus from the wheel itself, and dark tires with a satin look may draw more attention to the wheel and caliper.

Note: If the wheels have heavier brake dust build-up, you will want to spend more time cleaning them, since wheels are one of the main focal points when people walk past a vehicle, and spotless wheels can quickly set your car apart from the rest. For an in-depth look at cleaning more dirty wheels and tires, reference this video here: How To Effectively Clean Your Wheels And Tires

Wheel Wells and Fender Liners
While cleaning the tires, now is a good time to clean wheel wells and fender liners if your vehicle has them, so that you can be more time-efficient. For vehicles with plastic liners or painted inner fenders, our Fender Brush with Tire & Rubber Cleaner is an effective way to scrub away dirt, bug guts, tar, and other road debris that is flung onto the liners from the tires. If the plastic liners aren’t too dirty, you can use Waterless Wash instead, in the same manner that you cleaned the wheels earlier. Then use one of the Waterless Wash Towels that you used when cleaning the wheels to wipe away any excess residue.

On sports cars with low-profile tires and or cars with a lower ride height, you may find that our Fender Brush does not fit easily in between the tire and wheel arch to clean inside the fender, so in these instances we would recommend using the Small Angled Wheel Brush with its smaller diameter to fit around the tire to scrub the inner liner. Once you have the inner fender clean, you can treat plastic-lined ones with Undercarriage Spray to darken them and leave them perfectly black - nothing stands out more at a car show than a clean wheel and tire with a dirty wheel well, so make sure not to skip out on this step!

With the wheels, tires, and fender wells now looking great, it’s time to move onto a few more areas of the vehicle that warrant more attention or special care: exhaust tips, exterior trim, and the engine bay. Exhaust tips with soot build-up are another area that stand out like a sore thumb. You can spray the exhaust tips with Eco All Purpose Cleaner or Tire & Rubber Cleaner and scrub them with the Small Angled Wheel Brush to remove light soot and dirt, then use Waterless Wash and a Waterless Wash Towel to wipe away the cleaner residue. For heavier black soot and exhaust residue baked into the metal, you will need a more aggressive cleaning approach. Start with Metal Polish #1 with a Gray Microfiber Applicator, and work in the polish back and forth 10-20 times by hand, using light pressure. Then wipe away the residue with a Single Soft Towel. If some carbon build-up still remains, then move up to using #0000 Steel Wool as your applicator with Metal Polish #1. This works excellent, especially if the exhaust tips have rolled and polished inner walls, but keep in mind that the steel wool may leave behind very fine scratches as it removes the heavier contamination and brings them back to a shiny chrome-like finish.

Faded and dirty exterior plastic and rubber trim are often overlooked when preparing for a car show, and with just a few minutes of effort, you can have these areas looking factory-new. Our Tire & Rubber Cleaner with an Edgeless Utility Towel is the preferred combo for this task. The surfactants in the chemical, along with the tight-weave microfiber towel, provide powerful scrubbing ability to remove dirt, oxidation, and old wax stains, while making slightly faded plastic and rubber darker in the process. Clean any rubber trim around windows and drain channels on the roof, the plastic wiper cowl, any plastic cladding on door panels, roof racks, step rails, bumper inserts, bed rails, and more. Wipe away excess Tire & Rubber Cleaner using a second towel, and allow the areas to fully dry. After washing and drying the rest of the vehicle (later in this article), treat these plastic and rubber trim areas with Graphene VRT and a Bock Applicator to darken them even further, leaving a perfect satin look while protecting them for a few months.

Vintage Engine Bays
At cruises and car shows, you may find many of the vehicles are on display with their hoods down. Owners might do this because they may not want you to see all of their secrets under the hood, they may not have had time to clean the engine compartment, or they may not know how to safely clean an engine bay. You will most likely need a different approach when detailing an engine bay on an older vehicle than you would on modern vehicles with OBD-II computer systems since 1996. As mentioned earlier in this blog, you typically do not want to use a hose or pressure washer on engine bays of classic cars, so that you do not damage any ignition or wiring components, or get water trapped in areas that could then rust.

A very good alternative is to use Waterless Wash with several waffle-weave Waterless Wash Towels to carefully clean as many areas as you can reach. Use one towel to wipe up dirt and grease, then follow behind with a second clean towel to leave the area clean and streak-free. Since you will be reaching with your hands instead of brushes with this method, be careful not to cut your hands or arms on sharp plastic and metal components throughout the engine bay. Once finished, you should downgrade these towels to dirty or non-delicate jobs - in other words, wash these towels separately and do not use them on paint afterward if you removed large amounts of grease and oil when cleaning the engine.

Finish up the engine bay detail by using VRT on any large plastic areas and In & Out Spray on hard-to-reach plastic and rubber areas, such as hoses, wire loom, vents on the wiper cowl, and so on. In & Out Spray leaves everything looking perfect in seconds, and any over spray wipes away very easily from paint and glass. You can review our engine bay detailing video for modern vehicles here: Why and How Should You Clean Your Engine?