In this video Adrian shares with Harry a little of his 3 decades of experience inspecting Porsche. Over that time thousands have passed through his hands. You can’t just buy because they ‘look’ great in a picture. It’s the finer details that only come from in depth knowledge that help to distinguish which ones to go for or to avoid.

Exercising care pays in the long term, we avoid more issues, which means in turn our customers have a better experience, and with it, our reputation is more secure.

The approach we employ is to be looking for reasons to ‘not buy’, and then if we find none, the car can move to the next step of our process. Essentially, what we show Harry is an initial 5-minute inspection, looking for clues or for things that might indicate that we dig further. There are 4 steps before we are comfortable to offer for sale:

Step 1. The first is always done from the office, asking questions of the owner, checking history, seeing what we can discover, maybe using our online Porsche system, or data we have gathered.

Step 2. Assuming the information looks good, we bring the car in and give it an initial look over. That’s what we are doing here in the video.

Step 3. A two-hour inspection in our workshops where we can really use our experience. We check for things that you can’t usually see. For example, behind the right front arch liner on 996/997 is the ABS pump and the brake pipes here can be rotten on some cars. It’s an area hidden from MOT and not part of a regular service, so they go unnoticed. We check them. On modern Porsche we can interrogate the computer, both for function and history. We check the age of the tyres, and classics demand that we inspect different areas. Experience is key.

Step 4. Research and authentication. Louise loves wading through the history, researching chassis numbers, and pouring over reference materiel. She will document the ‘story’ of a car from the beginning, and this is valuable for a customer.

These are essentially the steps we go through before we are certain we want to offer a car for sale or not.

This five-minute walk around may be all that is needed to decide if a particular car qualifies for a full inspection…or that five minutes might prove enough to reject it for re-sale.

We doubt you will have had the combined experience that we have in the building, so we can’t recommend you take only 5 minutes, but a ‘once over’ can be invaluable if you keep your eyes open and know what you are looking for. Rest assured, Harry does not have the required level of expertise yet, but his keen eye is worth training, and in years to come with guidance, he will get better and better.

We would always recommend a pre/post purchase inspection on a car, or an advanced inspection which we craft to the individual car, and our customers requirement. They are not all the same.

If you would like to see more about our process, please take a look HERE, or if you need some help with an inspection, please get in touch.