COVER CARS
A professional rivalry is always healthy in the workplace.
This is true of any job – salesman vie for supremacy on the
monthly targets chart, racing drivers need to earn more
points than their teammates, politicians endeavour to accrue
the largest and most spurious expense accounts, advertising
execs battle it out to see who can have the longest lunches...
and at Meguiar’s UK, the rivalry is rooted in who can build
the coolest car.
What’s that now? Don’t they clean them rather than build
them? Ah, dear reader, these people are polymaths; they
don’t just work in the job they do because they’re passionate
about beading and foam concentrations (although that is of
course also true). These are car guys through and through,
born petrolheads, they just can’t help themselves. You’ve
probably spotted that we’ve been chronicling the Tom v
Dale build in our Fast Projects pages; the eagle-eyed will
also have been following their efforts on the fellas’ Instagram
pages, each demonstrating increasing levels of exasperation
and panic in the run-up to the Players Classic. The annual
Goodwood-based retro extravaganza was mooted as the
time and place to debut the two builds, and increasing levels
of jeopardy and fear were bleeding out from every orifi ce as
Tom and Dale shared ever more desperate looking images of
rusty hunks of metal and piles of crumbling bits.
...but those Meguiar’s boys had this all in hand from
the start. Of course they did. Sure, there was a frantic
fl urry of activity in each camp to get the cars together, with
no end of setbacks as you’d expect from disassembling
and reimagining crumbly old cars, and a colourful cast
of characters was drafted in at either end to make
these projects happen. And when the covers came off
at Goodwood, the crowds were uniformly agog at the
respective splendours that greeted them. These cars aren’t
just good considering the time constraints – they’re world-
class builds by any measure. Not merely thrown together to
meet a high-pressure deadline in the media spotlight, eachone has been built properly to add something unique to
their disparate genres.
‘Disparate’ is a concept we really need to focus on, in
fact, because traditionally when we shoot two cars together,
there’s a clear link between them – it might be a pair of
similar cars built by father and son, or a couple of mates who
have different ideas about how to approach the same car,
or two spec variants owned by the same person who just
couldn’t choose between them. But a 1971 Merc and a 1995
Renault? They don’t have anything in common, do they?
Well, yes, actually – they share two important things. Firstly,
you want them both. Admit it, you just do. And secondly, Tom
and Dale chose these cars because they’d been wanting to
build them for years. And that’s essentially why we do what we
do, is it not? This passion, it’s always growing.
Let’s start with the Renault, then. Now, the fun part here
is that it really works on two levels: on the surface, it’s a GT
Turbo, fi nished in yellow, to deliberately provoke onlookers
into making kneejerk Ali G jokes. You did it, didn’t you? As
soon as you saw it, that voice in your head started saying
‘R-E-S-T-E-C-P!’. But there’s a deeper level to this. TomThe Dimma 3-piece split-rims were
refurbished by The Wheel Specialist