I had a PM exchange with kas over the weekend, here is a cut/paste/edit summary of my thoughts for anyone else interested, or wants to comment on :thumb:
I've owned my car for almost 4 years I paid £67,000 with 12,000 miles on the clock and now with 33,000 miles on the clock I could probably sell for roughly the same.... Which is rather crazy to be honest but that seems to be the way that the market has gone! I'll admit now though that I haven't kept an eye on the market so I'm not really that clued up on values
I have never dealt with 911 virgin however I've only ever heard good things about them. I've called them in the past to make enquiries and they've always been very helpful.
I have had a couple of threads over the last few years on things that have been issues for me, the main one being the creaking front suspension which took maybe about 2 to 3 years to resolve.
Porsche themselves were completed clueless about the whole issue, which in the end was resolved by Chris Franklin at Centre gravity, who knew exactly what the problem was and how to fix it. The issue was worn bushes inside the front dampers, however other people have reported issues with the front suspension that seems related to the top mounts
Coolant pipes are also another known issue, and fixing that will be the next major piece of work I have done on the car. I don't know how much you know about this issue, but essentially Porsche decided to glue the coolant pipes together rather than welding [or pinning] together, as a result over the years there have been numerous cases of coolant pipes coming apart and dumping coolant over the rear wheels - very serious if you're screaming around a track or even driving on the roads
Another issue is as you mentioned with the differential fitted to the car as standard. The Factory LSD fitted by Porsche is widely acknowledged to have been made out of cheese and to last somewhere in the region of maybe 10,000 miles if you're lucky. Without a decent differential these cars can be very very lively at the limit and so I would say that on any GT3 you would need to understand whether the diff has been replaced in the past, when and with what part. There are a couple of options most people go for, the one I chose was to fit the Motorsport cup plates/pack which are approximately £800 from memory, and labour maybe about 500. There are other options including Guards who do a decent LSD as well as Wavetrack however I think they're quite expensive and I would just stick to the Porsche Motorsport plates. The latter is a very solid LSD, I think over the Summer I read Nick (NXI) saying he'd finally worn his out after over 100+ track days and a lot of road mileage
Other than those points, I can't really think of anything bad about the car at all. I was one of those people that usually bought a car and got bored after 6/9 months, however I've had this car for nearly 4 years which says a lot for me.... The fact that it seems to be going up in value is a nice to have, I would still keep the car if it wasn't appreciating at all
So to answer your specific question, is £65k for a 50k mile 997.1 GT3 good value.... Personally if it was me, I would seriously consider this car. What is likely is if you don't buy it at that price someone else most definitely will. But certainly I wouldn't see 50,000 miles something to worry about, provided it had been well maintained, especially as per the above points. Eg if the car has had the coolant pipes redone, a new LSD fitted, dampers refurbished etc, that would all certainly make the car more attractive to me and in some respects a no brainer. The costs of sorting the above would be around
1200 LSD
1500 coolant pipes [have since checked a quote I received which was actualy 2200]
1000 (?) Damper refurb (can't remember what I paid). Listen out for any creaking from the front of the car when you test drive
Maybe look to factor that into price negotiations as appropriate. Obviously any other work or upgrades (new brakes, discs, pads for instance) would help sweeten the deal. I don't think GT3's are as negatively affected by minor upgrades as Carreras seem to be
Cunno and Freddie will probably have further useful info to add, as well as Senoj who owned one previous to his 3.8RS. Apologies to anyone I missed. Cunno especially has a huge amount of modding experience with this specific model - I usually try and copy anything he does :grin:
8)