Washing your Ferrari....

I haven't washed my Ferrari with water yet in six months of ownership. Why? Because the ceramic coating sheds dirt and dust. The car is self cleaning. I do occasionally use an aircraft window washing spray and fine microfibre towel to clean it once a week to remove fingerprints and sticky dust. Takes less than five minutes to clean the entire car.

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As far as the ceramic coating goes, the reason it's so expensive to have it done professionally is that the expert will paint correct and polish the car first. That can take 20 hours of work depending on how bad your car is. Once polished and paint perfect, the ceramic coat is applied, which is not difficult to do.

If you put a ceramic coating on a car that isn't properly prepared with polishing and paint correction, you've just sealed in every swirl and chip the car has and it will never be fixed without a very labor intensive operation to remove the ceramic coating. So DIY ceramic is not a good idea unless you already know how to expertly polish and paint correct a car. Not a DIY job there usually.

 

Here's another source of great info, and you can buy whatever you need there too -

https://www.detailedimage.com/Auto-Detailing-Guide/

You can definitely DIY, but as John said, make sure you properly prepare the paint.

 

+1 Esoteric everything!

 

The ferrari paint is very soft so you can do most of the correction yourself with a good random orbital polisher, I ceramic coat all my cars myself and it lasts great. I really struggle to find anyone who is actually good at anything, they either are just a bit dim so don't realise their mistakes, are lazy so don't look at the details or just have a general lack of attention to detail. Always best to either do something yourself or find someone who has a genuine skill and passion for what you want to achieve. Even those with a genuine passion can still lack the attention to detail needed to do a really good job so best do it yourself and know its done well

 

I CANNOT say enough good things about my experiences with Esoteric! Zach has been a real asset every time I have questions about products. I buy almost entirely exclusively from them and have for the last few years. OP, I coated a friends G63 with Gyeon Sycro last spring, he’s a devout Rejex guy. He has since realized the gospel of ceramic coatings. Syncro is heads and tales above Rejex, better gloss, much better durability and phenomenal self cleaning properties. I will be re coating my truck this year (and hopefully a 488 if I can find one) with Kamikaze Zipang/Miyabi combo, which Esoteric is currently touting as the benchmark DIY combo. They also have a ton of helpful videoed on proper wash hygiene/technique and product usage on their YouTube page.

 

I will preface this by stating that I do not own a Ferrari and I’m not going to claim to know their paint, but I have heard it’s soft. Clay causes slight marring in all cars paint, but that marring is exacerbated in softer paints. Unless you plan on polishing out the car from end to end I wouldn’t clay it. You could do a chemical decontamination for iron and tar to remove the impurities from the paint if you do not plan to polish the car, which is what I would do in that case.

 

And this is why cars in American for sale ads look so much better than those over here. We just do not have this culture of paint correction and protection for relatively new cars in Europe. Very interesting.

 

I have had my Corvette since new-18 years- and I have never washed it. I just dust it with a feather duster and clean it with Eagle 1 Wipe & Shine.
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Haven't used water in years.

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