The owner of this 2017 Porsche Panamera was looking to keep his car as clean and glossy as possible while reducing maintenance during use as a daily driver. As such, we agreed upon an application of 22ple VX-1 Pro, which provides outstanding gloss and clarity with durability of approximately two years. Given that this car had seen a few automatic car washes and some improper rotary polishing, marring of the paint’s surface was present and would need to be corrected.
Before beginning work:
The wheels had a surprising amount of embedded brake dust after just a few weeks of driving:
Sonax Wheel Cleaner Plus was applied liberally to the wheels and allowed to dwell, making short work of the brake dust:
After a thorough wash with filtered water and a chemical decontamination process with CarPro’s Iron-X, it became a little easier to get the camera to focus on the marring, though these rotary swirls stood out in any lighting:
Aside from the driver’s fender and part of the door the marring wasn’t terrible, but it still was a shame to see it on a car so new:
Most panels showed straight, horizontal marring that must have been instilled via a vertical drum brush in the car wash:
Given the damage to the paint, the plan was to perform a one-step paint correction process to achieve ~95% correction. After testing CarPro Essence, HD Polish, and HD Polish mixed with D300 on various finishing and polishing pads, I was forced to escalate to a mix of Meguiar’s M100 and D300 on Lake Country black foam finishing pads. This combo removed the defects after 4-6 passes with slow arm speed and moderate pressure at speed 6 on the Rupes 21 MKII (75E for the tight spots). Surprisingly, the paint was hard enough that this step left the paint almost perfectly refined, but a quick finishing step with HD Polish on LC black pads bumped up the gloss a little, so the whole car was then finished in this manner. After this, the paint was washed and rinsed, then given a double wipe-down with CarPro Eraser. Following this 22ple VX-1 Pro was applied, which really made the metallic flake pop and provided a lot more wetness. A portable heater was used to keep the garage up to temp while this was going on (ambient temps were in the mid-high 40s).
After:
Fender and door sans rotary swirls:
