2021_ADN_V6_No3_web

NITTY GRITTY
Bowling Green, Kentucky. Santana restored
the Grifo gem in 2014 after it was
discovered in a family garage where it had
been sitting for 26 years.
The Iso Grifo was the Iso car company’s
most successful model. It was one
of only 400 built by the Italian carmaker
Renzo Rivolta between 1963 and 1974,
led by Iso’s chief engineer, Giotto Bizzarini,
who had been fired from Ferrari.
The National Corvette Museum is known
worldwide as the home of the Corvette.
Every Corvette in the world built since
1981 is assembled less than ¼ mile from
the museum at the General Motors Bowling
Green Assembly Plant.
However, there were two makes of the
Iso Grifo vehicle in the 1960s and 1970s
and the street version had a modified
Chevrolet small-block 327 Corvette V8
engine – thus the recognition by Corvette.
The race car version had a similar engine
and could reach speeds over 275 kph,
which was extraordinarily fast at the time.
The Iso Grifo owned by Santana’s
long-time client Sergio Arredondo of Pasadena
is one of only 200 street versions
known to still exist, qualifying it for the
museum recognition.
Santana had detailed other vehicles
for Arredondo when in 2014, he showed
him the Iso Grifo in an offhand discussion
about having it repainted due to the sad
state of its paint.
Santana convinced Arredondo a
respray would significantly lower the
value of the Italian beauty (and would
have in retrospect perhaps disqualified
it from the museum) and assured him he
could save the original paint with a full
paint correction.
At first skeptical, once Santana completed
the work, Arredondo was stunned
by the results and decided on a whim, to
enter it into the Pebble Beach Concours
D’elegance at Monterey Car Week, not
expecting to win, but enjoying the attention
his newly revived exotic received.
It won 2nd Place.
Recently handpicked for the famous
National Corvette Museum, Arredondo
once again called in Santana to prep the
vehicle for display at its new home.
Santana is known throughout Orange
County as an automotive paint correction
specialist and official member of the SO-
NAX detailing team who has detailed and
restored the paint on hundreds of priceless
classics and exotic automobiles in his
30-year career.
He called in a special team of Hispanic
detailers, some of them members
of the official SONAX Detailing Team,
and many of which Santana trained and
mentored himself through NGDN. Adolfo
Collado of Adolfo’s Pro Detailing in
Dinuba; Thomas Lucena of Magician
Pro Detailing in Glendora; Jose Junco of
High Performance Auto Detail in Encinitas;
and Christian Rosa García of Fashion
Exposure in Puerto Rico are living their
American Dream, despite speaking little
or no English, and yet doing what they
have a passion for doing.
“The car is a classic, so we had to be
very careful in steam cleaning the engine
and polishing every nook and cranny of
the engine to perfection because that will
be wide open and as much on display as
the car itself,” said Santana. “We polished
the paint to intensify the shine and protected
it with a ceramic
coating to seal in that shine for its stay
at the museum; we polished the rims to
a brilliant, diamond-like shine; and carefully
steam cleaned and reconditioned the
interior for preservation, all using SO-
NAX car care products.
The Iso Grifo has been loaded onto a
trailer and shipped to the National Corvette
Museum for a long and prestigious stay!
“To see that car before I restored it
and to see it now getting the respect it deserves
and to have been a major part of
that is as exciting for me as it is for Sergio,”
said Santana.
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VOL. 6, NO.3 • FALL 2021 | AUTO DETAILING NEWS | 25