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Olly398
I will admit that I almost cancelled the viewing of the cab - I was after all looking for a coupe, real men only have coupe's, etc etc.
But I went, met the seller, went to the car which was parked next to his Maserati and two down from his bosses 456 and after looking round the car he drove us over to Regents park.
On the way (roof up) the car felt pretty much identical to the coupe I'd driven the weekend before, no twisting etc, nice noise from the (sports) exhaust but nothing intrusive.
We got to Regents (the car is perfectly happy in London traffic), parked, and at a press of a button the roof folded itself into the boot. This was, no other way of putting it, fun.
I drove us round Regents for 4/5 laps and it was genuinely enjoyable having no roof, you could hear the engine note, feel the sun etc, it was nice.
I then got the PPI done at the garage that looks after the sellers bosses Ferrari, and it came up with 4k's worth of work. This was something of a shock as the car had had £3,000 worth of work in 2015.
However, we negotiated on the price, I got a quote from a (Sussex based) Porsche Specialist, and I should be able to get all the work done for the same value as the discount.
Whilst this was going on I was continuing to look at other cars, at this position in the market ALL of them need (it would appear) 2k's worth of work, sometimes what appeared to be a lot more.
In almost all cases the owner would not entertain a negotiation as they "knew the price of the car and it's not moving", I'd be very interested to see if some of the cars I looked at are still for sale in 2017.
Anyway, the cab had become a known quantity, it fit within my budget and the seller is a nice guy with whom I could negotiate so we were both happy that we had a deal.
On the cab's are for hairdressers side, yes - it's not what you'd pick for a track car. But, and this is important, its a car I want to drive in the countryside and track during summer to be able to explore areas of the handling that I can't on the road.
I have no illusions of being a driving God - I'd be the absolute epitome of "all the gear and no idea" if I turned up at Brands in a track-prepped, caged, howling and spitting GT3-alike.
I quite like the idea of learning to drive on the track in the cab - no expectations, and once I do work out how to get it to go round corners I suspect that I might enjoy the element of surprise, just as I do when the Volvo plays it's "I'm rather faster than you think I am" card today on other drivers.
We'll see, what I am fairly confident of is that I have negotiated a price that means I won't lose a great deal of money if I hate it and want to sell it, and if I do love track driving and learn how to do it properly then a stripped and caged coupe could be a feature of the next couple of years.