Storm prep for a collector car is mostly done in the quiet weeks before a named storm exists. What to handle now, what to skip, and what actually damages paint in a Florida summer.
Hurricane season runs June through November, but the damage most collector cars take in a South Florida summer has nothing to do with a named storm. It comes from the season around the storms: daily rain, standing humidity, salt carried inland on the wind, and the weeks a car sits untouched because the weather never gave you a reason to drive it. Storm prep for a garage-kept car is mostly a matter of getting ahead of that season while the radar is still clear.Start with the garage, not the carA sealed, conditioned garage is the single biggest advantage a collector has in this climate, and most garages in Broward and Palm Beach counties are neither sealed nor conditioned. Walk the space on a wet afternoon and look for the tells: a damp smell, rust freckles on bare tool steel, condensation on the concrete near the door seal. Concrete holds moisture and releases it for days after a heavy rain, and that vapor sits in the same air as your paint and brightwork.You do not need a climate-controlled showroom to get through the summer well. A dehumidifier sized for the space, run on a humidistat rather than a timer, keeps the air below the point where condensation forms on cool metal. Aim for the fifty to fifty-five percent range. Below that you are spending electricity for little gain; above sixty-five, unprotected metal starts to sweat every time a cold front follows a wet week.Wash before the car sits, not afterThe habit that costs owners the most paint in summer is parking a car dirty because a storm is coming. Whatever is on the paint when the car goes into the garage stays chemically active the whole time it sits. Love bug residue etches clear coat in days in July heat. Bird droppings are worse. Salt film pulled off A1A on a Sunday drive keeps drawing moisture out of humid air for weeks.If the car is going to sit through a stretch of bad weather, it should go in clean and dry. That means a full wash including door jambs and wheel barrels, then a real drying pass. Water left in mirror housings and trim seams is what turns into water spots and trim staining a month later. If the car wears a ceramic coating, this is when the coating earns its keep, because a coated panel releases contamination with far less effort and holds less moisture film.Fuel, battery, and rubberA car that may sit for six weeks needs three things handled. Fill the tank to keep condensation from forming inside it, and add a fuel stabilizer if the car sees fewer than a few hundred miles a season. Put the battery on a quality maintainer, not a trickle charger from the nineties, because modern cars draw current at rest and a dead battery in a car with electronic latches is a genuine problem. Set tire pressures a few pounds over spec, since a car that sits develops flat spots, and modern low-profile tires do it faster than most owners expect.When a storm actually formsOnce a named storm is inside five days, the work is mostly logistics. The car goes in the most protected structure available, which is not always the nicest one. A windowless center bay beats a garage door that faces east. If the garage door is the weak point, and in most Florida homes it is, a bracing kit installed before the season is worth more than anything you can do in the last two days, when hardware stores have nothing left.Do not wrap a car in a tarp