Well this next post could have been an "I bought one" but unfortunately not.
However, despite the essay below, I thought it worth relaying my experience of the last couple of days for a couple of reasons.
On Thursday, I went up to Southport to see a silver aerokitted car - an almost 300-mile round trip. I took the day off work to view it and arrived at 10 am and by 11 am, had agreed a sale and left a deposit. The seller (a trader but not a trader - you know what I mean) agreed that I would pick the car up on Saturday morning as I was in London on Friday with the family.
I returned home (naturally pleased that the effort had been worth it), rang my insurer to tee up a Saturday call, checked the bank's electronic transfer limit etc. and sent the seller a message to say all was good for 10.30 on Saturday. The same afternoon, the seller calls and says he was sorry but while he was out on work-related business, his very elderly father had become quite entrepreneurial and sold the car to someone else and let him drive off in it (LOL). I struggled with this explanation as on the Wednesday, the day before the viewing, I rung the seller's home number and his father answered and did not suggest he was capable of or interested in entertaining a viewing but just saying it's my son's car, he'll be back later. Also, the seller's wife had written my receipt out and she might have noticed a car that she sold earlier in the day being sold to someone else.
I was speechless (pretty much literally) and just said return the deposit. Presumably, he'd allowed a second viewing and used my "sale" to get a higher price. So, not a great start to the search for a Porsche - I've never had this sort of thing happen before, maybe I've been lucky in the past.
I should also mention that this was the Silverstone auction NEC car (R34 ???). The car was very tidy (it had clearly been detailed, which makes a massive difference and some paint - the front bumper was unmarked) but there were a couple of noteworthy points:
- a massive hole in the history, it had covered around 3,000 miles in the last 10 years or so but no history beyond 2009;
- the clocks had been changed and therefore the mileage went from 67K to around 29K. The explanation for this was that a used set of clocks were used and the mileage on those was 29K and there was a handwritten note (how convenient) on the service book to that effect.
I'm after a keeper so was willing to ignore/overlook those issues (others might not have done although clearly one other person was willing to buy it but not sure what they know of its history!).
That's all folks - a strange experience.