Audi RS5 Sportback: Paint Correction, Ceramic Coating and What the Lights Reveal

A Fast Audi in a Loud Blue

The RS5 Sportback is one of my favorite shapes on the road. It's a four door with a hatch, a twin turbo V6 and all wheel drive, so it's quick everywhere and still carries people and luggage. This one is Turbo Blue, a bright, saturated color that suits the car perfectly.

It came in for a paint correction and a ceramic coating. When the owner dropped it off, the car looked good. Then we rolled it under the lights, and that's what I want to talk about in this post.

Why Your Car Looks Fine in the Driveway

Almost everyone who brings us a car for correction says the same thing at some point. They say it looked fine until they saw it at a gas station at night.

There's a simple reason for that. On a cloudy day or in open shade, light hits the paint from every direction at once. That soft, even light fills in fine scratches and hides them. A single bright light does the opposite. It hits the paint from one direction, and every tiny scratch catches it and throws it back at you. That's why swirl marks jump out under a gas station canopy, a streetlight or direct sun, and seem to vanish everywhere else.

The scratches are there the whole time. The light only decides whether you can see them.

How We Look at Paint

So when we inspect a car, we take away the flattering light. We use bright, focused lights and hold them at different angles and distances, and we look at each panel from more than one side.

You can see what that shows in the before photo of this RS5. Around the reflection of the light there's a patch of fine scratches and haze in the clear coat. In daylight you wouldn't have picked it out. Under the lamp there's no missing it.

We check the paint this way before we start, so we know what we're dealing with. We check during the correction, after each section is polished and wiped down. And we check again at the end, because the lights are how we know the job is finished and the swirls are truly gone.

The Correction

With the paint mapped out, we started with a test spot to find the gentlest pad and polish that would clear the defects, then worked around the car one panel at a time.

Each panel is split into small sections. Each section gets a few drops of polish on a clean pad and slow, overlapping passes with the machine, and you can see the doors being done in the photos. Then it's wiped down and checked under the light before we move on.

The after photo is taken the same way as the before. The same kind of light is pointed at the paint, and this time its reflection is a clean, sharp shape with nothing scattered around it. That's the standard we hold ourselves to on every panel.

The Ceramic Coating

Corrected paint is at its best and completely bare, so it's the right moment to coat it. The coating went on with an applicator block, one section at a time, and was leveled with clean towels. There are photos of it on the hood and being leveled across a headlight, because we coat the lights as well as the paint.

A coating does two things worth knowing about. It's chemically resistant, so bug splatter, bird droppings and hard water have a much harder time staining or etching the finish. And it's slick, so dirt lets go more easily and the car needs far less rubbing to wash.

That second one is what protects the work we just did. Swirl marks come from the paint being rubbed, and a car that washes easily gets rubbed a lot less.

The Result

Outside in the Texas sun, which is about the harshest inspection light there is, the Turbo Blue is clean and glossy with crisp reflections down the whole side of the car.

It'll look just as good under the gas station lights tonight.

Curious What Your Paint Really Looks Like?

We're a paint correction, ceramic coating and paint protection film shop in Plano, TX, and we work on performance cars for owners from Frisco, Allen, McKinney, Richardson and Dallas. Bring your car by and we'll put it under the lights with you. It only takes a few minutes, and you'll know exactly what's there. There's no pressure, and we're always happy to talk cars.

(469) 954-9735

info@humblecrewautospa.com

535 Talbert Drive STE 113, Plano, TX 75093

Monday to Friday, 8:00 am to 5:30 pm