Making the 911 that Porsche were too sensible to consider

A few years ago I reached 40, so I bought a Porsche 911 - it was that or have an affair with a colleague, and Aaron wasn't willing.

I wanted a specific model, which I almost ended up with. Specifically, I wanted a 996 Coupe, as that was the current model when I became interested in cars, back in the mid to late 90's.

The 996 was produced from 1997 - 2005, with a facelift halfway through the run, earlier cars are typically referred to as 996.1, later cars as 996.2. Porsche produced a variety of body styles, powertrains and levels of tune which resulted in a lot of choice.

However, what I wanted was the earliest car I could find, a manual coupe with amber indicators, cable throttle (as opposed to an electronic one), a three spoke steering wheel and hard backed sports seats. I spotted what I thought was a great example of this, which belonged to a chap who worked in Selfridges - the car was parked in the Selfridges car park and my office was around a 20 minute walk away. When on the phone to arrange this the seller pointed out that it was a cabriolet, which wasn't what I was after - but it was lunchtime, it was sunny, I thought why not so I went to see it.

We took a test drive around Regents Park - very sedate, but huge fun, in no small part due to being able to drop the roof. I was sold on the idea of an open car on that drive and decided that this was a nice little car, and more importantly I liked the owner and felt that I could trust him (I'd been to see other cars that I very definitely could not say the same about).

We arranged a price, and the seller offered to drop the car into the garage that his boss used to perform a pre-purchase inspection, just for peace of mind. When he'd handed over the keys they called me, I paid over the phone and they went over the car. The result? £4,000 or so of work listed.

I have to admit that I was going to walk at this point, but the seller said "look, not that I know the car needs it I'll have to get it done before I could sell it to someone else, so I may as well reduce the price by that amount if you still want it?"

Faced with such a reasonable offer I paid £9,500 for the car, drove it home and very, very carefully reversed it into it's new home.

The next morning I drove it to Precision Porsche for its first service.

Now, originally I was planning on keeping the car 100% stock, and just bringing it up to as close to a concours condition as I could stand maintaining. That changed.