I am new to the Porsche world and have benefited from the knowledge found in this community. I don’t yet have much to share back but can offer suggestions to others that also want to come up the learning curve from a low starting point. When I started the journey, T, E, and S meant little to me and SWB, MFI, and Fuchs meant nothing at all. If you fall into that camp, hopefully this note will help, especially if others add to it or correct what I get wrong.
I am still a beginner but have made it as far as feeling good about my first 911 purchase. It is a one-owner 1971 T Targa that has spent the last 47 years in southern California. Here are some learnings along the way:
• Selecting a Target Car. The 911 has evolved along a core path with many offshoots over its 50+ years. As the many topics addressed on this forum indicate, there are a lot of details to sort through.
Peter Morgan’s book, Original Porsche 911, 1964-1998, is a wonderful resource to get grounded. It has a chapter on each early 911 configuration. Reading it helped me understand the evolution of the engine from 2.0L to 2.2L to 2.4L, of wheels from 4.5” steelies to ever-wider Fuchs, and how fenders, bumpers, trim, etc. changed over the years. I came to see how those details shaped my 911 preferences.
The book also has information that answers many questions that are posed on this forum, such as production count by model, VIN range by model, and option availability.
With that book as a guide, I targeted Targas in the 1970-72 range.
• Picking a Purchase Process. I started out looking at the major Internet sites and was quickly captivated by Bring-A-Trailer. However, I eventually realized that BAT is not the right channel for me. I’m not expert enough to bid with confidence, especially on a car that I’ve never seen. I decided to avoid auction-based purchase processes and use the Internet only to identify cars that I could arrange for an expert to view.
I also settled on a Los Angeles focus (i.e., I targeted cars from the LA area even though I live in the Midwest). I picked LA for three car reasons and one personal reason: 1) LA has a large base of early 911s, 2) the physical environment is friendly to cars, 3) there is a vibrant base of service providers for pre-purchases inspections (PPIs), etc. and 4) my son lives there.
If I had it to do all over again, I would more vigorously explore engaging Bill Kelley, also known as Techweenie (www.techweenie.com), who offers services related to purchasing early 911s.
I began to get traction once I settled on the LA strategy.
• Arriving at price. It took me a while to arrive at a perspective on car evaluation that now seems obvious. That is, car valuation is a product of three primary factors: car type, originality/authenticity, and condition. By car type, I mean model year and build spec. For instance, there is a big difference in value between a 1972 S Coupe and a 1968 L (yes, those exist).
I had a target price in mind; I then traded off between car type, originality and condition to stay within that price point. My goal was to buy a car that I can enjoy now but has “improvement opportunities” for later.
I found it straightforward to determine originality (at least to the degree it matters to me), but hard to place a value on originality.
A big driver of valuation is whether the car has its original exterior color, interior color, engine and transmission. That base level of originality seems to be worth +20% as far as I could determine (more to some buyers). Valuation shoots up with higher degrees of originality, as seen by a recent BAT transaction in which a 1973 T sold for $156,000.
[BTW, the auction results on BAT are an excellent data set to understand value]
This forum has a lot of discussion about how to determine originality. My layman’s view is that there are three paths: 1) obtain a Kardex (a sort of production build sheet), but those are only available for cars built before approximately mid-1970, 2) obtain a Porsche Classic Technical Certificate (“PCTC”), or 3) engage a person here on early911Sregistry that goes by the name davep (I don’t know his sources). Note that cars can have a Certificate of Authenticity but if it doesn’t already have a CoA, you can’t get one.
People don’t seem to be too happy with the PCTC route, but that is the path I took. My experience was good. Here is a link to the web site that describes that program:
https://www.porsche.com/usa/accessor...alcertificate/
It costs $500, the car must be physically inspected (fraud safeguard) by one of only 11 Porsche dealers in the US, including one in LA. They quoted 4 weeks to complete the report, but I was given an informal indication within a week (i.e., the service department contacted me).
To assess condition, I engaged Autostrasse (https://autostrassecorp.com) for a PPI. I was happy with their services which cost $300 for an inspection plus $300 for a leak down and compression test.
Shout out to Dave B. at TRE Motorsports, who helped me along the way. I didn’t do business with them due to geography, but they seem like a good shop.
What do I most worry about from the above decisions? That I will regret not getting MFI. I heavily weighted the share of my budget that would go to condition, in particular rust minimization, and also emphasized originality. That took me out of E and S range, though I might have been able to swing a ‘72T (which includes MFI).
This note is running long so I will end it here. Perhaps others will add to it or correct me where necessary. Hopefully it will help somebody enter this interesting corner of the world.
Thanks again to the early911Sregistry community.
Howard