Buying my Porsche 911

Doing the Homework

Once I had settled on a 996 - a manual Carrera or Targa - I dove in. Over a few months, I easily spent countless hours learning about the car before I got serious about pursuing one. I wanted to understand it well enough to tell a well-sorted example from a money pit, and to know which questions to ask.

Most of that time went into the M96 engine’s weak points - the IMS bearing, bore scoring, the rear main seal, and the air/oil separator (AOS) - and what a car that has had them addressed looks like on paper. I learned what a borescope inspection can reveal about the cylinder walls, and why sellers of good cars are happy to provide one. I also learned that LN Engineering keeps an online registry where you can look up whether a car’s VIN has had the IMS Solution installed, which ended up mattering a lot.

Where I learned:

• YouTube - countless buyer’s guides, DIY videos, and engine teardowns.
• r/996 - owners sharing buying experiences, repair bills, and plenty of “should I buy this?” threads.
• Rennlist - the 996 forums go back more than two decades, and almost every question has been asked and answered there.
• Rennstimate - a reality check on what cars were actually worth.

Where I shopped:

• Bring a Trailer, Cars & Bids, and PCarMarket - past results on these sites became my best pricing data, and the comment sections often taught me as much as the listings. Sharp eyed commenters ask the questions a seller would rather you didn’t.

The Hunt

By the time I started bidding, the hunt was very specific.

I was looking for the right combination of condition, maintenance history, color, options, and price - while accepting that a 20+ year old Porsche will always need attention somewhere. The goal was not to find a perfect car. It was to find an honest one with a good foundation, one that I could drive, improve, and make part of our family’s story.

Over a few weeks, I went deep on a handful of cars. These are the ones I actively pursued:

Car	Where	Miles	Outcome	Why it caught my eye
2002 Carrera (996.2)	Brea, CA - PCarMarket	~105k	Walked away	The 3.6L 996.2 at a fair price. I negotiated directly with the seller, offered $26,000 subject to a borescope, and walked when it showed light scoring and an early stress crack in the cylinder walls.
1999 Carrera (996.1)	Fresno, CA - BaT	45k	Sold for $32,750	Low mileage for a 996.1, and a good test of what the market would pay for a clean, early car.
1999 Carrera (996.1)	Lakeville, MN - Cars & Bids	~79k	I bid $28,888; sold for $29,138	An unusual color combination and a thick file from a respected Porsche shop. It also needed a water pump and had a flywheel rattle.
1999 Carrera (996.1)	Fort Wayne, IN - BaT	89k	I bid $34,250; sold for $36,500	An early build with the dual-row IMS, upgraded to LN’s permanent IMS Solution, two clean borescopes, and about $30k of receipts. A near-perfect example.
2003 Carrera Targa (996.2)	Cottage Grove, MN - BaT	115k	Won at $26,250	The sliding glass roof, about 5,150 996 Targas built in total, a verified permanent IMS fix, and a story the listing didn’t fully tell.

I also studied plenty of cars I never bid on: a 101k mile 2001 in upstate New York that sold for $18,750 after a smoky cold start; a beautiful Meridian Metallic 2002 in Oregon that went for $40,000; a 43k mile 2002; and a couple of dealer cars in Texas and California that were priced like sorted cars without the paperwork to back it up.

Losing the Indiana car stung, but it taught me the most important lesson of the hunt - know your number, and be willing to lose. I set a ceiling from the data, went one increment past it, and still lost to someone willing to pay more. That was the right outcome. The winner paid more than the car was worth to me, and I sat tight for the next one. It was also around this time that I decided that I wanted a 996.2, rather than a 996.1.

Buying the Targa

On paper this car had a lot working against it. 115,000 miles, ten previous owners, three trips through dealer auctions, aftermarket 19” wheels, a broken sunshade, and no service records at all from its last three years in Florida. Most buyers scrolling past would see a tired, high-mileage car with question marks.

But a few things kept pulling me back. The Targa is rare - Porsche built only about 5,150 of them out of roughly 175,000 996s, less than 3% of the total. And the more I dug, the more the car’s real story diverged from the one in the listing.

The paper trail

One of the listing photos was a screen capture of the car’s entry in LN Engineering’s IMS registry. It showed the LN IMS Solution had been installed in March 2022 at 88,500 miles by Motorwerks Auto Group in Houston. The Solution is the permanent fix, with no service interval, designed to last the life of the engine. Replacing the IMS bearing requires the transmission to be dropped, and most people get the clutch, rear main seal, and sometimes the flywheel replaced at the same time, since all those components need to be removed to reach the IMS.

Interestingly, the Motorwerks service was not posted on the Carfax.

That raised a question. What else had been done to the car by Motorwerks?

Phone call with the seller

I called the seller, and he couldn’t have been more straightforward. He had bought the car at auction over the summer and had only put about 200 miles on it. He was selling because he could no longer comfortably use a clutch and wanted a PDK 911 instead. He walked me through everything he knew - the car drove well, pulled hard, and the clutch grabbed nicely. The sunshade cable was broken, the seats moved a little slowly, and one key fob was temperamental. He hadn’t changed the oil. And he didn’t have any paperwork from the 2022 job.

He was open about what he didn’t know, and I appreciated that.

The conversation no one else had

So I contacted Motorwerks directly. Within a day, two people from the shop had pulled their records by VIN and written back. Alongside the IMS Solution, that March 2022 visit included:

• A new clutch, flywheel, and rear main seal
• A new air/oil separator
• New engine mounts
• New front struts and rear shocks, sway bar end links, and an alignment
• A transmission service, brake fluid flush, Targa top service, and a major service

Combined with the water pump and thermostat replacement in 2023 shown on the Carfax, that turned the picture upside down. This wasn’t a tired 115,000 mile car waiting for a big bill. It was a car whose biggest M96 weaknesses had been dealt with within the last 26,000 miles.

To my knowledge, nobody else in the auction had that information. One sharp eyed commenter looked up the registry too and asked the seller whether the clutch and AOS had been done at the same time. The seller honestly didn’t know. Everyone else was pricing in an unknown clutch, a missing service history, and a faint puff of smoke on a cold start that I had asked about publicly earlier in the week.

Settling the smoke question

That puff of smoke was my one real worry. Smoke from the driver’s side can point to bore scoring, the M96’s other well-known failure. So I asked the seller for photos inside both tailpipes. They came back dry and evenly gray, and the driver’s side, the one I was worried about, was actually the cleaner of the two. That’s what condensation looks like, not an engine burning oil. Combined with the new AOS in 2022, which is a common cause of a brief cold-start puff, I was comfortable.

I also decided against a pre-purchase inspection. On an auction, there is a real risk of paying for a PPI and then getting outbid anyway. The car would get a proper inspection once it arrived in NYC.

Setting the number

I had learned from Indiana that a ceiling is only as good as the data behind it. So I pulled every 996 Targa sale I could find from the past year - fourteen of them on BaT - and lined them up by mileage, maintenance, and outcome. The pattern was clear. Cars with a documented IMS fix and a recent clutch sold for $32,500 - $35,250. Cars without that paperwork sold for $25,000 - $29,000. The documentation mattered more than the mileage.

Then I worked out what the alternative would cost. Buying an unsorted coupe and paying to sort it myself. That gave me a break-even point. Anything below it, and this Targa was the better deal.

Auction day

My plan was simple and boring, on purpose:

• No early bids, no more comments. I had asked a lot of questions publicly, and a bid from me may have told everyone the skeptic was satisfied.
• Watch the Carrera first. A stunning Meridian Metallic 2002 coupe closed 55 minutes before the Targa and sold for $40,000. Several of its underbidders had money ready and nothing to show for it, and at least one of them came straight over to the Targa.
• Enter late, bid the minimum, keep a steady rhythm, responding with 45-60 seconds left on BaT’s two-minute clock.
• Stop at my number. I had a firm ceiling.

Bidding was quiet for most of the day. It sat in the low teens an hour out, climbed through the high teens in the final minutes, and then the real bidding started. I came in with about a minute left, stuck to minimum increments, and the hammer fell at $26,250, comfortably below my ceiling and well under what comparable sorted Targas sold for in the spring. With BaT’s 5% buyer’s fee ($1,312.50), that came to $27,562.50 before shipping.

What I’d tell someone starting their own hunt

• Do your homework first. The hours I spent on forums, videos, and past auction results paid for themselves many times over.
• Know your number before the auction, and know why. Comps, mileage, documentation, and what the alternative would cost you.
• Losing is fine. Losing Indiana was the best thing that happened in this search.
• The best information usually isn’t in the listing. The registry, the shop that did the work, and a polite email told me more than 140 photos did.
• Ask most of your questions privately. Public questions help everyone, including the people bidding against you.

The car is on its way to NYC, with a proper inspection, a catch-up service, and a set of factory 18s to follow.

Next up: Shopping Spree