After years of running a mixture of boring, terrible and very good new cars, I decided to buy what might be my last analogue, manual car - a 1998 Porsche 911 (996) Carerra 2. It is an early car, built on the same production line as the outgoing 993.
Below is a journal of my ownership journey to date. I also post too many photos of it over on Instagram.
I had some odd jobs done on the car this week. I had noticed a clonking noise which was annoying as I thought I had replaced the likely culprits. A new tuning fork on the passenger side fixed that. As part of the work done, I also got an alignment. My steering wheel is straight again! Amazing. On hot days, I had also noticed the clutch had a horrible squeak. I had hoped this would simply be a case of lubricating the pivot points in the pedal....
I booked the 996 into local specialist D&G Porsche Specialists for a checkover so I could be confident that I had not bought a death trap and/or money pit. (The money pit bit is assumed.) They said the car was pretty clean for its miles and suggested the following work: Coffin arms all round Rear upper arms Front bump stops New front top mounts Geometry setup Core plug replacement to address a minor leak on bank 1 The previous owner only had the car for 18 months and was kind enough to share the PPI report they had done with me....
Recent cars I’ve owned have had modern LED lights which makes night driving much easier. Older cars lights are shockingly bad in comparison as technology has moved on a lot in 25 years. I took a punt on some 150% extra light bulbs from Halfords. Huge upgrade and very cheap. They don’t appear to run hotter or draw any more current so I’m hopeful nothing will melt. Changing the bulbs is easy....
My 996 has the middle of the range “hi-fi” package consisting of the MDR32 mini disc head unit (made by Becker) and six Nokia speakers powered by a small Nokia amp in the frunk. A Porsche CDC 3 changer was also added later by a previous owner which works perfectly, after I had found some CDs. No luck in finding my minidisc mix tapes from 2001. As it isn’t a Bose system there’s no weird DSP units or optical connections, as far as I know....
After doing the PCP and lease thing for many years, I sold my BMW M140i back to the dealer in May, leaving me with £5K in my pocket. Little did I know that I could have kept it for another year and get even more. Never mind. I knew I wanted to just buy something interesting outright for not very much money. One last silly car before everything is electric. I decided on the last analogue 911 - the unloved 996....