I'm one of 'those OTT guys' on Detailing World LOL!, and my XR2 is from almost the same age as your 500 and also has solid black paint, so I have a good idea of your situation.
It does kind of depend whether you're working by hand or have access to a machine polisher.
I'll assume you are working by hand and so products I'd recommend are:-
Good old Autoglym Super Resin for an initial application to slightly remove but mostly fill in and hide any light swirlmarks or spiderwebbing that may be on the paint. Obviously without seeing any pics I can't establish whether it has any or how bad they are. SRP on it's own isn't that durable so really needs topping with a wax or sealant of some kind, which I'll come to later.
If, after the SRP layer, you wanted to really add some 'wetness' and depth of gloss to the paint, then you could use a 'glaze' next. 2 that are particularly great on dark colours and black especially are Poorboys 'Black Hole' and Meguiar's #7 'show car glaze'. These 'glazes' don't offer any protection on their own, they are just designed for adding oils and fillers into the paint to smooth out the surface and, as I said, make the paint look 'wetter'.
Great waxes on black are: Collinite 915, Dodo Juice Blue Velvet or Purple Haze, Victorias Concours Wax, Poorboys Natty's 'blue' or even better 'red'
If, however you didn't really want to bother with a 3 stage system of Polish > Glaze > Wax, then a great single step product is Raceglaze Crem perfection it's a superb carnauba based 'All in one' product that works great on solid black paint. I used this almost exclusively a few years back and during that time I won 2 1st places at Ford Fair. Very easy to use and smells lovely, which is always a bonus.
I have kind of 'glossed over' (no pun) this to keep the post from being pages long and to keep it condensed, but hopefully it's helped a bit - any questions give me a PM
Most of the stuff I've mentioned is available from:-
www.cleanyourcar.co.uk
www.elitecarcare.co.uk
www.raceglaze.co.uk
Couple of pics of my black paint after using an SRP base, No.7 glaze and Natty's 'Red' wax. Since these pics, I've machine polished it and so it's now even better, but you get the idea.
Cheers
PV
