My 2011 Turbo came with a high end fully integrated radar detector / laser jammer, the Escort 9500ci. It was state of the art back in 2011. The benefit of a fully integrated system is that you can’t tell its there…no ugly device stuck to your windshield. The drawback is that unless the manufacturer supports an upgrade path, it ages quickly. When I saw that my local PCA chapter, the Pacific Northwest Region, was putting on a TechEd session all about radar detectors I just had to go.
PNWR arranged to have Ariel Bravy from Vortex Radar lead the class and it was informative and fun. This was my first TechEd session but if they are all this well put together, it won’t be my last. We started with some classroom sessions to learn all about the equipment, the options and how radar and laser works in general. There were some off-duty and retired police officers there to lend their perspective as well. Then we went outside and got to test some cars and guns to see how they held up. Mine did okay shifting the laser hit but it was able to punch through eventually. The clear winner to beat laser is the AL Priority system which also issues frequent updates. Escort has never and will never update the older 9500 system. While having a radar detector is fun to play with, my outdated tech isn’t going to keep me out of trouble against modern laser guns so I’ll stick to Waze and save the really heavy foot for the track.
The Sport Chrono Package in a 911 comes with a bunch of fun features like sport/sport plus mode, launch control, dynamic engine mounts, etc. It also comes along with the chronometer (aka, the wart) that sits on your dash and is used in conjunction with a stick on steering column as a lap timer. It’s basically just a very accurate stopwatch. Super cool…and I never use it. I’m sure if I did a lot of competitive track driving I would love it for the data logging. I don’t.
Sitting in a Starbucks parking lot, I was playing around with the lap timer and finally found a cool use for it…now it will just display 911 until I reset it 🙂 I am way too proud of myself for getting it to hit this on the mark…those digits fly by! I won’t admit how many times I had to try!
Sunday was a pretty typical January day in Seattle…cloudy with a high chance of rain. I have a choice with this car. Baby it and treat it like a garage queen, or enjoy it rain or shine. This is no garage queen so we took it out on a cold rainy day for our first Sunday drive. The temps would be in the low 50s so not too bad for the summer performance tires.
Meg and I ditched the kids and took off to have some fun. When I got home, my youngest son, Shep, wanted his first ride and so I went back out. I brought along my camera this time and stopped at a favorite spot of mine for some quick iPhone shots…nothing fancy.
Shep was very patient with me but also wanted to get in on the action 🙂
I randomly ran into a co-worker that was there to take some skyline photos and he shared a few of his shots with me as well. Thanks to https://www.instagram.com/wildmanzen/ for the photos.
My automotive mechanical skills are severely lacking but I can tackle the easy stuff and I completed my two must do mods this morning:
I started by re-flashing my Cobb tune to stage 1 on 91 octane since 92 is the best I can find in the Seattle area and I don’t want to mess with custom mixes. The last owner had the 93 octane tune. I’m sure I won’t notice a difference and this will give me peace of mind. Say what you want about Cobb vs custom tune but this was so easy to do myself. I’ll have to see how the car feels with the stock engine and PDK tune so I can appreciate what I have. Super easy to flip back and forth.
Next I installed the Rennline ExactFit iPhone mount. Picked it up from Suncoast and the install was super easy, just follow the video they provide a link to.
I like the look, where it mounts and that it doesn’t interfere with the passenger, the glove box or cover up the PCM.
After a short wait that felt like forever, today was delivery day! The streets in my neighborhood are small so I decided to have the car delivered to a car club I belong to. Weather gave me a break and the delivery, inspection and ride home was rain (and snow) free.
My son capturing that “how does this work again” look on my face as I’m prepping the camera equipment:
It is really here!
A short video of the delivery:
Some fun photos we took quickly on our way out before the weather turned worse:
After a brief hiatus, I’m back where I belong behind the wheel of a Porsche 911. After some pricing / market research and a ton of great input from others, I will be taking delivery of a beautiful black 2011 997.2 TTS this week! The car was purchased from Tristan @ RAC Performance and it was a quick and easy process. I wish I was able to meet them in person but I felt very comfortable doing business with them remote.
A stunner!
The original owner checked a lot of nice boxes, my favorites being the factory aero package and Turbo II wheels!
The full leather interior with the leather center console looks really nice and I love the painted back seats…just can’t let my kids sit back there now
In addition to a nice set of original options, the car has a SpeedTech exhaust, integrated 9500CI radar system and the Cobb engine/pdk tune so it saved me at least $8K in upgrades. Full front clear bra as well. I would have preferred an all black interior, but with a black car the two-tone might actually be a nice break from black. I did order a set of black floor mats for the car.
The car was just put on a delivery truck and is enroute to Seattle…should be here by the weekend weather permitting.
I had narrowed my search to the 2010 to 2013 997.2 TT or TTS with the PDK transmission and knew there were plenty of them out there for sale, even in the winter. What were my must haves…I needed a list!
White or Black were the only two colors I was focused on…must not be lured into the siren song of some bright bold color that would draw unwanted attention. Didn’t want any version of gray/silver…Seattle is gray enough already.
PDK – shifting is fun but not in Seattle traffic.
Coupe – All my other 911s have been open top cars but for the Turbo, I wanted the classic lines of the coupe.
Clean Carfax, no accidents, no mysteries
Under 50K miles, ideally under 40k
Turbo II (5 lug wheel) instead of the centerlock wheel. My Targa had centerlock wheels and I’m one of the few that likes the looks and maintainability of the standard 5 lug.
TTS or a TT with torque vectoring and sport chrono (includes launch control and an overboost-function)
Three spoke steering wheel with the paddle shifters, I find the other wheel fugly.
Sport seats, manual or adaptive. The standard “comfort” seats do not fit my body type as well…they push in the shoulders.
The first contender was this beautiful 2011 997.2 TT from DrivenTexas (VIN WP0AD2A91BS766568). They were fantastic to work with but the PPI revealed a leaking RMS (rear main seal) and a few other issues. The price was good for a TT but not good enough in my opinion to cover the work it needed. Plus, it was on the higher side for mileage that I wanted and didn’t have the sport seats:
This next one may go down as “the one that got away”. White was my top choice and early on in my search I came across this stunning 2012 TTS with only 12K miles (VIN WP0AD2A94CS766498). The only thing that held me back was the gray interior and my assumption that I had all the time in the world because I was looking at sports cars in the winter…it would never sell. The PPI was clean and this car would eventually be mine after I got around to making my low-ball offer. It sold to someone else the day after my PPI for a full price offer…ouch.
I became totally enamored with the next car and was soooo tempted to buy it but in the end, I couldn’t get past the accident history and the body kit and mods were just too much for me. It was counter to most of my criteria but appealed to my inner 12 year old (which generally has control over the rest of me). I had found a 2012 997.2 TT with only 14K miles and it was way below market. It was also a Cab and a manual which I didn’t want (or do I), heavily modified and had been in 2 accidents. Not anything that would impact reliability or drivability but it kills the resale. It had a ton of high quality performance mods, a genuine Vorsteiner V-RT aero package all around, ADV trackspec wheels, Brembo GT brake kit and a Tubi Style exhaust. I managed to track the history of the car (why was I doing this?) and confirmed the original purchase and modifications were done by Ben Bermudez, CEO of Wheels Boutique. He told me a bit about the car. He used it as a wheel model and drove it as his personal car until he sold it. His modifications:
Custom tune by Protomotive (confirmed by them directly) – “The tuning we did for it would cover a broad range of bolt-on mods that were done at Proto Tech.”
Custom engine work done by Proto Tech (confirmed with David directly who did the work) – Phone call with David from his memory, no records. Beautiful car. They did a program update, intake, custom made equal length headers (he asked if his beautiful headers were still on the car), intercooler and turbo upgrade. He couldn’t remember the exact upgrade, said it could have been a housing upgrade, GT2 style upgrade, etc.
Vorsteiner body kit, Brembo big brake kit, wheels/tires and H&R springs were all done by Ben himself at Wheels Boutique.
There was another manual that I had my eye on for a while that was for sale on the East Coast at a McLaren dealership. Beautiful Basalt Black Coupe with 45K miles but the asking price was too high for my blood and I needed to keep reminding myself that I wanted the PDK.
These were all contenders…but they didn’t turn out to be “the one”. Thanks to all of the Rennlist members that helped me narrow down my search and provide their thoughts and opinions on the various options I was looking at – Feedback thread.
I’ve always loved cars, and in particular I have always loved the Porsche 911. I’ve owned an old air cooled 78 SC Targa. I had the pleasure of owning a rare air cooled M491 optioned Cab, an 87. I was lucky enough to be able to order a new 2016 911 GTS Targa. I had so much fun tracking it on the shipping route from Germany and even watched it live on a webcam as it went through the Panama Canal like a lunatic. For all the right reasons that I don’t regret for a second, I had made a major career move from the private sector to the non-profit world. Not surprisingly, it is much less profitable and as a result, I sold the Targa. After a few years without a 911 to call my own, I was feeling the itch. Time for some research!
I wanted to avoid taking the depreciation hit of a new car again so I spent a lot of time searching for a car that captured the true essence of Porsche, was still a bit modern, was at the bottom of the depreciation curve and would be fun to drive. After some initial research I narrowed my choice to a 2010 to 2013 997.2 TT or TTS Coupe with the PDK (manuals are actually much more expensive and for this car, I ideally wanted the TTS/PDK anyway. I had never owned a 911 Turbo and this model year seemed like the perfect fit!
I did a complete analysis of every car that fit that criteria available for sale in the US (this was in Nov/Dec 2019) and here are some interesting facts:
I found 106 cars currently for sale
Only 9 with a manual transmission with prices ranging from $80K for a high mileage tired looking Cab to $155K for a low mileage Coupe.
Model year has little impact on price in this range, it is tied to mileage and condition.
Average price for a Manual Cab is $98K with 30k average miles over 6 cars
Average price for a Manual Coupe is $120K with 25K average miles over 3 cars
Average price for a PDK TT Cab is $88K with 25K miles over 17 cars
Average price for a PDK TT Coupe is $85K with 33K miles over 21 cars
Average price for a PDK TTS Cab is $95K with 25K miles over 22 cars
Average price for a PDK TTS Coupe is $99K with 32K miles over 37 cars
Here are the price and mileage trends followed by trends for just the coupes (click to enlarge)
With this data I had what I needed to evaluate all of the available cars and find the best deal that checked all of my must have boxes.
I created a thread on Rennlist which has this data and some additional data / viewpoints in the thread – Research thread
911 Maniac 