🏎️ I Bought a Barn Find Vintage Porsche - Max's 1982 Porsche 911 SC

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Good day, dear readers!

Today I have an exciting one for you. It’s a little change of pace, and something I have been alluding to for a long time…

It’s the story of how I found & bought my vintage Porsche 911.

It’s also the first in a series I’ll be doing on my cars, covering how I buy them, everything that’s wrong with them (spoiler: I don’t have the cash to buy museum examples, so I usually end up having to fix a LOT), and everything I do to get them in working, daily-driving order.

You can expect the “Max’s Cars” series to come out… very randomly. Though, if you really like this type of content, let me know & I’ll do everything I can to keep these coming as regularly as possible.

So…

HERE WE GO.

😱 Max Bought a Vintage Porsche 911…

Today’s Edition is brought to you by Morning Brew

But First, the Highlights…

• 🌏️ Driven around the world: 147,000* - I’ll explain the asterisk later, I promise

• 🎼 Song to Get the Vibes Right: Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ - The Rolling Stones

  • My personal favorite ‘starting a fun drive’ song.

• 🏇 Can beat ~300 horses in a fight

• 💰️ Predicted Price: $??,???

The year was 2021.

I was still living in South Carolina, had no garage, and had recently realized there were some seriously concerning issues with the E39 BMW M5 I owned at the time (timing chain guides were deteriorating, for those who know about these cars).

Luckily, I was working remotely & my wife (girlfriend at the time) had her ol’ reliable (ish) Chevy Cruze. So… I didn’t really need a working car.

Unluckily, the repairs on the docket were going to cost upwards of $5000. This was a hard hit - I didn’t know how to do the fixes myself (spoiler: I am not a professional mechanic), I didn’t know any shops in town had experience with this fix. I didn’t know what I was going to do.

Then, a couple things happened around the same time…

First: my former boss & current friend/mentor (we will call him Clyde, his name isn’t Clyde, but its late on Sunday evening rn so I’m not going to text him to ask for permission to use his name) let me know he was moving. Why was this important? Well… the new house was bigger, but it had less garage space.

Clyde and I are both car guys. I knew he had a couple fun cars. Both were Porsche 911’s, one vintage & the other that he drove more frequently was a Baltic Blue Porsche 996.

We had talked about them numerous times… and by talked about them, I mainly mean I was pestering him with questions and drooling over the prospect of owning not one but TWO 911’s.

Anyways, the less garage space meant he had decided to sell one of his cars & it was the vintage, ‘G-body’ 911 he had owned for more than 15 years.

Specifically, it was a 1982 Porsche 911 Super Carrera (SC), in Guards Red, black interior, RS-inspired duck tail spoiler, a set of front brakes from a Porsche Boxster for improved stopping power, and MOST IMPORTANTLY… it had an engine swap.

The previous owner had, using a kit from Patrick Motorsports, removed the stock engine (which made about 180hp) & replaced it with an air-cooled flat-6 engine out of a 1993 Porsche 911 Carrera that, after a few modifications, was making around 290hp.

Now… that doesn’t sound too crazy by itself. But this car weighs 2500 pounds.

It has the same power-to-weight ratio as a MODERN DAY Porsche 911 GTS.

I was flabbergasted. Blown away. I knew I wanted the car already.

BUT… if you noticed that first picture in this email, you may have come to the conclusion that this car was not being driving very often. It was mostly just sitting in his barn for at least a few years, collecting dust.

Clyde was very straight with me about this. He paid to get the car professionally detailed, inspected, and made sure the car was in solid driving order. But, he told me, it wasn’t perfect. 

The paint wasn’t original and had a ton of imperfections, the electrical system was a bit wonky following the engine swap and years of these cars selling for less than $20k (and being treated as such). It didn’t have air conditioning, relevant heat, a working odometer, or a rev limiter, and with the modified lightweight flywheel the car revs so fast it would be really easy to cause damage.

I’ll cover everything that was (and still is wrong) with the car in a future episode, but for now let’s affectionately call it a ‘drivers car’.

WTF is a driver’s car? Basically, a fun project car that’s beat up (or worn down) just enough that you don’t have to worry about taking it for drives.

So Clyde tell’s me everything about the car, refers me to his mechanic so I can ask them whatever I want, and offers to let me take the car for a test drive.

I say hell yes, obviously.

And so, on a rainy day in late August, 2021… I fell in love.

Not with Clyde (though he is great), but with that vintage 911. If you want to know why I fell in love, read the section ‘How it Feels’ in my previous newsletter.

I realized during that test drive that this 911 could be mine…

If I was stupid/ballsy enough to buy another old car while my existing one was sitting broken in my driveway.

If I was enough of an idiot to buy a second car when I worked remotely, and legitimately never had to drive anywhere.

If I was willing to ignore everyone’s advice & all conventional wisdom.

And if I had so few brain cells that I thought the best way to realize my dream of owning a Porsche 911 was… not by buying a cheaper, more modern, base 911… but by buying an unused, heavily modified, 40-year old 911.

In my defense… this was the car that was in front of me. And was beautiful. And it was being sold by someone I trusted.

Silly nonetheless.

What REALLY tipped the scales was the other thing that was happening at the same time I was learning more about this car…

I have a good friend, a former coworker at BMW, and one of the only people in the world I can confidently say is more car obsessed than me. His name is Kyle.

Kyle has a habit of buying neglected BMW’s and bringing them back to life. He does all the work himself, and is like me in that he has trouble saying no when a car is for sale in close proximity to him.

I told him the problems I was having with the M5. I offered to buy all the parts he’d need to fix the timing chain guides. He offered to buy the M5 from me.

So effectively, I could just trade my broken M5 for a working 911.

Seemed like a no-brainer, right?!

Then, Clyde told me the price. And, before I say it, keep in mind this was peak Covid used car prices. Porsche’s especially were going crazy. Other comparable 911’s (without any modifications) were going for $35,000. The 964 generation Porsche’s (the generation of 911 that the engine came out of) were selling in the 6 figures, REGULARLY.

So, with all that said, the asking price was $40k.

When I heard that my first thoughts were (in no particular order):

• I can buy my dream car for the same price as a new, fully-loaded Honda Accord.

• With the engine swap, I’m basically getting the cheapest Porsche 964 in the country, it just happens to not be a 964.

• Why am I so freaked out?

And on that last point… I still don’t really know the answer. If I had to guess, I think it was because it felt like I was skipping a few steps.

Regardless of the money, did I even deserve this car yet? I’ve spoken with so many people that have said things like ‘man, I always wanted to own a Porsche’ when I know they could have. Why didn’t they? What was I missing?

I spent a couple days thinking about this & decided a few things:

1. It doesn’t matter if other people do or don’t buy the cars they say they want.

2. The only way to find out if it was a stupid decision was to make the decision and see what happened.

3. I would DEFINITELY regret passing this opportunity up.

I was 26 at the time. I had the money for the car, didn’t need to drive frequently (so if it was unreliable, it was no biggy), I had no kids and my wife had a reliable, modern car we could do longer road-trips in.

So, I got a small loan from Lightstream (because my credit union thought I was an idiot and wouldn’t finance it (which I honestly completely understand)) and I told Clyde I would buy it.

He gave me the keys and on my drive home I took the picture below to capture the moment.

It’s not a great picture, but it was in a moment where I was incredibly happy. I was proud of myself for being brave enough to pull the trigger, excited I was driving my dream car, and overall in disbelief that the whole deal came together over only a few days.

I did not realize that, in less than 24 hours, I would be stuck on the side of the road with a broken new-to-me 911, getting towed…

But that is a story for another time.

In my last two years of ownership, I’ve done a TON of work on the car. Maintaining, modifying, & improving the car as much as I can.

It is still my only car. It still leaks a lot of oil. And it the electrical system is still a mess.

But I love it, and I’m very happy I pulled the trigger on buying my dream car.

I think that whole experience is a big reason why I wanted to start MaxFindsCars.com…

To put interesting cars in front of as many people as I can, educate about the process of buying vintage/enthusiast cars online, and share my passion with the community that has given so much to me over the years.

P.S. Do you guys like this, more story-driven, style of content? Does it come across well in the newsletter? Let me know in the poll below!

IF YOU’RE FUNNY, MEAN, OR NICE ENOUGH, YOUR REVIEW MIGHT GET FEATURED IN A FUTURE NEWSLETTER…

That's a wrap for today. New Editions come out every Monday & Friday! While you wait, go out and drive! And if you want more, be sure to follow Max’s Twitter (@maxjzin)

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