Five years ago when “Wicked” Wade Becher and his father started Wicked Wraps in Everett, Wash., they bought their first printer, and printed and installed wraps out of the senior Becher’s garage. Today, they operate out of a well-equipped shop in Marysville, Wash., and business is booming.

A client contacted Wicked Wade, asking if the company could wrap his lime green 2010 Shelby Super Car Aero. After looking at e-mailed photos of the vehicle and determining it could be done, Wicked Wade said yes. An Internet search, however, gave him some pause: The car was a super-exotic worth $650,000, and was the fastest production sports car (at 257+ mph in the world). The Aero is designed by Jerod Shelby and manufactured at his production facility in West Kennewick, Wash. Currently there are a dozen 2010 Aeros in existence, 10 in Dubai and two in Washington state.
As delivered, the car was lime green with a polished black stripe down the center. The client at first thought about metallic gold paint, but the turnaround had to be seven days.

“I thought the perfect material was going to be FLX Paint Film,” Becher says.” I had heard good things about it and from what I had seen the stuff looked great in samples. I also considered using cast vinyl with a cast overlaminate; the client, though, was reluctant to have the car wrapped due to a prior bad experience with another local wrap shop.”
After a meeting with the client — and realizing the wrap posed a challenge because of the complex curves, pressure of working on an expensive car and the extremely tight deadline — Becher enlisted the help of Jeff Merrell, a nearby independent vehicle wrapper he’d met.

The Wicked Wraps team met. The job would be in matte black, as the client requested.
Becher’s team opted for Oracal’s 970RA Wrapping Cast Film, a product Becher hadn’t used before, “but my experience and knowledge in Oracal products left me feeling confident it would be the perfect vinyl for the project, especially since it was 4 mils thick and had the flexibility of  a wrap with an overlaminate.”

“We guaranteed that at no time would a knife blade touch the surface of the car during the install and outlined the entire wrap process for the client.”

Receiving the film overnighted by Fellers from its Ontario, Calif., warehouse, work began on a Saturday morning.

“We laid transfer tape all over the floor to hold dirt down, prepped the Aero with 50-50 isopropyl alcohol, filling in all the areas that we couldn’t tuck the wrap around; this took the entire first day, as a lot of the curves and small details on the car needed to be approached this way.”

The deadline was the following Tuesday morning. Not be a problem.

The wrapping film went down easily and looked just like paint. “We used hard-plastic sheetrock-mud spreaders and triple layers of 3M painter’s tape to cut against in all door jam, body-seamed areas, around head lights, window seals,” Becher says. “That was perfect — no blades touched the paint.”

Wicked Wraps, along with the client, completed the car by applying gold-cut vinyl event decals supplied by Sam’s Signs, Sacramento, Calif. The gold decals were designed by the client for his Gold Rush Rally event, where the Aero was revealed to the public.

This is an example of what can happen when a business uses the right products, the right tools and the right people on a job and the final result is exactly what the client was dreaming of, if not better. Wicked Wraps can now can boast that we have the “World’s Fastest Wrap.”