KEEPING IT CLEAN
To get you started with your collection of go-to car cleaning gear, here’s a useful selection of readily available, low-cost products to help give your Porsche a satisfying shine...
RACE GLAZE COLOUR-ENHANCING RUBBER DRESSING
If your Porsche was manufactured in the late 1970s or 1980s, there’s every chance it carries a large rubber spoiler or wing at its tail. Until now, you might have been wondering which product to use in an effort to restore the rubber’s colour, which may have turned from black to grey through exposure to UV light over the decades. This colour-enhancing rubber dressing from Race Glaze exfoliates and restores weathered grey exterior plastic back to black. The product features no silicone and can be used on spoilers, wings, rubbing strips, tyres, bumpers, engine parts and even interior plastics. Race Glaze claims the light petroleum-based ingredients will ensure the finish lasts five times longer than water-based dressings and won’t streak or run on application.
Taking the form of a thick opaque gel in a 250ml bottle, the product is best applied after old dressings are removed with a degreasing agent, thereby allowing the Race Glaze product to soak into underlying plastic without hindrance.
If using as a tyre dressing, apply the product and leave for a matte finish or buff lightly for a satin effect. This colour-enhancing rubber dressing forms part of a massive range of car care products from Race Glaze, all of which can be ordered direct from the More Than Polish website.
Price: £8.99 morethanpolish.com or call 01780 749449
AUTOGLYM POLAR SERIES CLEANING KIT
You’ve bought a pressure washer, but you’re still having to get busy with a bucket and sponge, right? Wrong! Thanks to the new Polar Series range of products from respected car cleaning brand, Autoglym, you can now complete the standard three-stage (pre-wash, wash and paint protection) process with nothing more than patience and a pressure washer.
Kicking off proceedings is Polar Blaster, a high-quality foaming gun. Creating lashings of thick, clingy foam when fed with Polar Blast snow foam, this excellently designed product also optimises the density required to efficiently deep clean with Polar Wash pressure wash shampoo. Additionally, the Polar Blaster gun produces the perfect consistency to apply Autoglym’s super-hydrophobic Polar Seal paint protection coating. The adjustable spray pattern allows you to easily follow your car’s contours, ensuring total coverage and appropriate dwell time on mud, traffic film and other contaminants. Let’s take a look at each of these products in more detail.
Polar Blast is a snow foam pre-wash. Covering the entire exterior with a thick blanket of foam ensures none of your car’s surfaces are missed during the cleaning process. The foam clings to paintwork longer than regular shampoos, gently loosening and lifting dirt before washing.
Polar Wash is a safe and effective shampoo applied using your pressure washer after pre-washing with Polar Blast. Like the latter, this impressive cleaner will cover your Porsche in a blanket of foam, making light work of dirt, traffic film and road grime removal.
Finally, Polar Seal is a protective coating specially formulated for application with a pressure washer. The product imparts a protective hydrophobic coating, causing water to bead on your car’s bodywork while protecting paintwork for effortless follow-up washes. Simply spray onto a clean, wet Porsche, then rinse and dry to leave behind a super-glossy, wax-like finish in seconds.
Price: From £15.40 per fluid, £40 for Polar Blaster autoglym.com or visit your nearest branch of Halfords
CHIPEX ULTRA-HIGH PERFORMANCE FACTORY FINISH MIRACLE DETAILER
There’s little more frustrating than spending an age cleaning your Porsche, only for it to attract dirt and bug spatter as soon as you hit the road. Thankfully, help is at hand thanks to Chipex’s UltraHigh Performance Factory Finish Miracle Detailer.
Bottled in a 500ml spray applicator and supplied with a microfibre cloth, this is the ideal travel companion for you and Porsche. Simply spray a misting of the product over the offending contaminant and wipe away. And if your car doesn’t benefit from a ceramic coating (and if you don’t have any wax to hand), this fantastic Chipex product can also be used to give your car a gloss finish after washing — wash and dry your car in the normal way, then spray Miracle Detailer and wipe away with the microfibre cloth to get an amazing gloss finish.
The product is safe to use on all exterior surfaces, including glass, for an excellent finish and protection. 911 & Porsche World readers can take advantage of a generous discount, too. Include the code 911&PW10 during checkout at the Chipex online store.
Price: £12.95 chipex.co.uk or call 01295 258308
CARBON COLLECTIVE PRIMA HAND POLISHING KIT
Prima is a one-step high performance cutting compound designed to cover a wide range of correction duties on all common paint systems, including modern ceramic nano-particle and scratch-resistant clearcoats, as well as conventional paint finishes. Brought to you by UK detailing product specialist, Carbon Collective, Prima uses state-of-the-art diminishing abrasives created from high-purity aluminium oxide. These diminishing abrasives break down quickly during use, forming a progressively finer polishing residue. As a result, the level of cut diminishes quickly from a moderate strength cutting compound to an ultra-fine finishing polish, cleverly correcting and refining the paint in a single step.
Teaming Prima with the appropriate pad for the paint type, the overall level of cut can be carefully controlled to obtain perfect results every time. For example, when Prima is used with Carbon Collective’s slim (50mm) Hex polishing pads, pad compound number one can be used for a heavier cut, compound two for a medium cut and the polishing pad can be used to finalise and refine the finish. Created from the same foam as the firm’s machine polishing pads, Hex hand polishing pads are designed to optimise cutting power without the need for a machine polisher. Additionally, they’ve been designed for polishing awkward-to-reach areas, such as wheel face cut-outs, behind door handles and inside panel gaps.
Price: £33.95 500ml, £46.95 one-litre carboncollective.com or search Amazon
DETAILERS UNITED HYDRO HOOVER DRYING TOWELS
Detailers United is one of the UK’S fastest-growing detailing brands. If the quality of the company’s Hydro Hoover XL 1,400gsm drying towel is anything to go by, it’s easy to see why. Featuring twisted loop fibres to catch water (believe us when we tell you this thing will hoover water off the surface of your Porsche), this thick, plush and super-absorbent drying towel is edgeless, meaning 100% of the surface of the product is design to absorb water whilst protecting your paintwork. Unlike the vast majority of heavy duty drying towels, Hydro Hoover isn’t made by gluing two separate towels together. Instead, it is produced from two 700gsm towels sewn with a fagoting stitch around the edge. This allows the two towels to move independently of one another, trapping an increased amount of water. A single Hydro Hoover XL (50x80cm) is enough to dry a complete 911 or similar-size Porsche. An XXL version (70x90cm) is available for larger models, including Panamera, Macan and Taycan.
Price: £12.47 XL, £16.99 XXL detailersunited.co.uk or search Amazon
SCRATCHSHIELD BUCKET FILTER SYSTEM
Washing your car can always be a gamble between achieving a highly desired glass-like finish and dulling the paintwork by adding swirl marks and scratches — if your wash mitt touches the bottom of the bucket and collects sharp grit, you’re more likely to abrade your Porsche’s paintwork than polish it! An essential tool for any car washing routine, Scratchshield creates a one-way filter system providing a barrier between your wash mitt and unseen harmful grit and debris lurking at the bottom of your bucket.
Designed to fit in most buckets (though deep twenty-litre wash buckets are available separately), the product’s swirl pattern and legs act as baffle plates to reduce the chance of creating a vortex, which could disturb trapped dirt and debris, pushing it in the path of your wash mitt. Manufactured from recycled plastics (as is the packaging), Scratchshield is a patented product and is now offered with or without a newly developed grit magnet, taking all the benefits and advantages of the standard Scratchshield to the next level by attracting an average twenty percent of the ferritic material removed during the wash process. With or without this development, we can’t stress enough how important it is to have this low-cost product in your arsenal of essential car cleaning products — it might just save you a fortune.
Price: £7.29, £11.99 with grit magnet, £32.49 twin filter and bucket kit scratchshield.co.uk or call 0845 582 0285
MEGUIAR’S GOLD CLASS SHAMPOO AND CONDITIONER
This rich, sudsing car shampoo is designed to both wash and condition your Porsche’s paintwork paint in one easy step. The formula gently foams away tough dirt, road grime and contaminants, all without compromising wax protection. The conditioners reveal colour and clarity, leaving behind a brilliant shine, helping paint look radiant. Importantly, Gold Class contains biodegradable detergents, meaning a deep clean is safe for the environment.
Due to how amazingly well this rich foaming shampoo suds (one capful is all you’ll require for a twenty-litre wash bucket, meaning even a 473ml bottle of Gold Class will last many washes), it is also an excellent choice for use as a snowfoam. Simply mix at a ratio of five-to-one and let the your snowfoam cannon do the rest.
Dish washing detergents are aggressive degreasers which strip away waxes, polishes and promote oxidation. For this reason, you should always select a premium ph-balanced, nondetergent car wash soap, such as Gold Class, and use at the recommended dilution.
This thick, concentrated shampoo and conditioner will gently deep clean, boost gloss and preserve your Porsche’s wax protection and paint sealant, bringing out the car’s original colour in the process. Importantly, Gold Class easily rinses without leaving smears or water marks and will remove bug splatter and other contaminants without the need for heavy scrubbing.
Price: £12 473ml, £24 1,892ml meguiars.co.uk or search Amazon
RACE GLAZE REFILLABLE WATER FILTERS
In-line water filters have short service lives and can be an expensive way of reducing the risk of water contamination when washing your Porsche. Race Glaze has found great success with its innovative range of refillable heavy duty water filters, taking the form of durable 11bar pressure-tested fibreglass tanks filled with premium grade mineral absorbing resin (where other water filters make use of poor quality ‘reject’ resin). Tap water enters the tank and is forced through the resin bed under pressure, emerging on the outlet side as close to zero parts per million of dissolved solids as possible. Race Glaze claims this method of filtration eliminates the risk of unsightly and often damaging watermarks on paintwork, allowing you to dry panels without having to rush around your car at warp speed. A choice of 7-litre, 14-litre or 25-litre filters (producing between 400 and 1,400 litres of pure filtered water) is available, each supplied ready for you to equip with standard Hozelock-style hosepipe connectors.
Price: 7-litre filter £105, 14-litre filter £195, 25-litre £299.99 raceglaze.co.uk or call 01780 654065
AUTO FINESSE HOG HAIR DETAILING BRUSHES
These luxury Hog Hair detailing brushes from leading car care product retailer, Auto Finesse, are hand-crafted in the UK and feature fully balanced solid wood handles and epoxy-set chopped bristles seventy-five times longer than the industry standard, enabling them to deep clean the most complicated of wheel spoke designs.
Perfect for detailing wheels, grilles, door shuts and those hard-to-reach areas around bodywork badges, the super-soft natural bristles are safe for use on paintwork and won’t inflict swirls or scratches. The brushes, sold in pairs, are housed in a signature Auto Finesse ‘black box’, perfect for storage after use.
Where lesser detailing brushes lose bristles easily, these high-quality brushes will retain their hog hair and can be easily cleaned between washes. As you’d expect, they form part of a huge range of detailing products from Auto Finesse, including feather-tip brushes featuring super-supple synthetic bristles ideal for detailing the most intricate areas of your Porsche, both inside and out. Developed specifically for dusting and deep-cleaning delicate finishes, they’re sold as a pack of four, each brush being a different size — overall lengths range from 210mm (with a 30mm bristle diameter) to 240mm (with a 45mm bristle diameter).
Price: £24.95 hog hair, £19.95 feather-tip autofinesse.com or search Amazon
Not all wash mitts are created equal, as proved by Gtechniq’s WM2, a microfibre wash mitt with an inner foam core designed to retain a high volume of wash solution (this benefit becomes immediately apparent when considering the amount of water lost when using a noodle wash mitt). Manufactured from a strong, durable microfibre with split varied length polyester strands for optimum contaminant release, WM2’S multi-layer construction makes it the pinnacle in wash mitt technology, delivering optimal glide, contaminant capture and release characteristics.
To maintain WM2’S efficiency, Gtechniq advises enthusiasts to wash microfibre products separately from other fabrics to avoid cloths being contaminated with lint. No fabric conditioner should be used when washing any microfibre towels or wash mitts — fabric conditioner will clog the microfibres, causing them to become matted and radically reducing their ability to perform as intended. Simply wash your microfibres at 50°C using half the normal amount of bleach-free detergent. Either machine dry at a low temperature or air dry over a clothes horse.