Running Report 1 - May 2002

The Purchase

I bought my 964 back in 1998 when I was still living in England working as a senior software engineer. I drove it from the “wrong” side of the road for a year until I decided to return back to Spain for good. I have to say that, as most people with left hookers, I didn’t have any problems being on the other side and I enjoyed the different point of view that I had on roundabouts and motorways that allowed me to take advantage and overtake were others couldn’t because they didn’t see what I could see. Something that I used to do a lot was, when driving in the fast lane of the motorway (always!), easily check on the left (my side) if the car blocking my way was in fact overtaking a slower car in the lane to the left or was just an inept driver, in which case I would start flashing my lights…

Back to the car, it is a summer 1991 C2, that is, a 92 model sporting dual airbags, teardrop mirrors, 16” cups (shame that weren’t 17”), lowered suspension (not sure if from factory or not but Spanish OPC seems to think that it is) in turquoise green and very light brown interior (don’t know real name of the colour).

Before buying it with 80km (50k miles) I did my homework. I had it checked by an specialist, checked the car history, service manual (which started in Stuttgart), etc… Everything was correct; the car was impeccable including interior and exterior. This car was quite different to another one that I looked at before, a red guards C4 that looked nice but was found to have a two pages list of minor faults but expensive to repair. I walked away from it with a broken heart but it was a good decision in retrospect.

I had to install a Cat1 alarm to get it insured which was quite expensive but understandable since I was just 27 and with a UK driving licence for only 2 years (although 9 years in total with Spanish+UK licence). I installed a Clifford top of the range alarm. It even had proximity sensors based on radar. This is a very nice alarm, no problems with it at all, no false alarms ever. The only problem at first was the sensitivity fine tuning but I got the installer programming instructions to fine tune it myself and I managed to leave it spot on, when a kid tries to put his grease hands on my window to see “how much it does” the car chirps and the kid doesn’t even get to touch the car . At first I was a bit afraid that this could make someone to “key” the paintwork in revenge but I never had a problem in almost 4 years of ownership. On the other hand, I have a problem as result of the alarm installation. The heating blower wasn’t working and that meant that moist was always building up in the interior of the windscreen making difficult and dangerous the driving. It happened just before driving to Spain for Christmas with two people in the car, I had to go all the way with the side windows slightly opened to minimise the problem. At the end, and after visiting a Porsche specialist without success and leaving the car with an OPC for a week, the problem was found to be a missing relay that the alarm installer forgot to put back!

More Power

After buying the car I had to slowly I learnt how to drive it. I will always remember the words of the guy selling me the car. He said something like “be very careful, it’s very powerful” when I was about to drive off with my new car. He was really afraid that I was going to crash it, may be he found me too young for such a car. It was good advice because I took it very, very easy at first and then built in skill and confidence slowly. After a year I started to feel that I wanted a little bit more power and as I was already planning to go back to Spain, where unfortunately we do not have such good Porsche specialists as you have in the UK (and probably in the US as well) I thought of installing the Hotfilm conversion from AMD. Unfortunately, they had a very long waiting list and they didn’t have the time to install it before I had to go back to Spain for my new job so after much juggling I managed to get a slot to just do the ECU re-mapping on their rolling road.

Going to AMD was a nice experience. Two or three months before going to them I felt that when accelerating in second gear from low revs there was some very slight knocking. I could only notice it when driving with the windows down and in a road enclosed by walls so the sound of the engine could be reflected and reach my ears. In AMD we saw the problem. In the runs before the ship remapping we found a loss of power and torque around mid range to recover afterwards and achieve a maximum of 248bhp, two less than it should be. Geoff very skilful corrected the problem in the remapping, now there was no power/torque loss, more power and torque was available from the start of the rev range, the torque graph was slightly flatter and the new top power was 272bhp, funnily enough the same than an early 993.

I can tell you that the car is that bit faster now and to prove it a month ago a 993, a Boxster and my 964 had a fast run on a twitchy three lane road. The Boxster was the faster taking the fast (very fast but for obvious reasons I won’t put it here) turnings, the 993 followed and very close was my 964. The main difference was in the up hills; both the Boxster and the 993 were left behind by my 964. I doubt that a standard 250bph 964 could have done that.

Changes

The other change that I have done to the car was a full re-spray at the OPC using a tone slightly bluer than the original turquoise green. The paint work had already its fair share of stone chips and parking scratches all around (I had stone chips on the roof!) so I decided to go for the full re-spray. For a while I was tempted to change the colour to Speed Yellow but at the end I chickened out and settle to use the next tone to the blue of my colour from the colour palette the OPC had. The new colour is not as “interesting” as the Speed Yellow but enough uncommon and not as much strident.

As probably all 964 owners with the factory sound system, I was not happy at all with its performance so I decided to upgrade. I had installed a Clarion CD head unit (no CD charger the boot is small enough already!), a set of 10 Audiotop speakers (2 x 6” woofers/midrange + 2 tweeters at the back, 2 x 5” woofers + 2 midrange + 2 tweeters on the doors), and an 180W RMS power amp installed very neatly in carpeted MDF inside the spare wheel to save space and with enough wiring to move it around in case I need the spare wheel. It now sounds much, much better than the original equipment which I could hardly hear at high speeds!

When I was living in England I had the windscreen cracked. I called the insurance and I replaced it at Autoglass. This proved to be a big mistake that I didn’t realised of until 2 years later. Apparently the windscreen was installed “correctly”, everything was in its place but it seems that they didn’t seal it. This meant that water was getting between the windscreen and the frame through the rubber and 2 years later some rust started to show on the bottom of the left hand side pillar. I took the car to the Madrid OPC and they did a good job repairing it and sealing correctly the windscreen. You have there a lesson to learn in case you didn’t know already.

I use the car daily and I have put on it this years 60k km (37.5k miles) needing just some oil and the regular services until last summer when I had to change the clutch, as it normal after that mileage. But recently I have started to get a stream of failures that I guess are due to age (it’s now almost 10 years old!). What worries me is if I’m going to continue having a constant stream of small failures due to parts arriving to the end of their useful live or was just a bit of back luck. I would appreciate other 964 owners experiences and comments from Ed.

Repairs and Maintenance

First a plastic piece on the sunroof failed that prevented it from closing without hand aid (dangerous as you could catch your finger!).

Then one day the starter motor failed in a strange way, I turn the key, the car starts, the starter disengages from the engine but the starter doesn’t stop turning. At first all I could hear while I was getting out of the parking was a strange noise from somewhere in the car that I never heard before. I touched the gas pedal and the noise didn’t seem related to the engine revs so I thought it was not the engine, for a moment I almost decide to ignore the noise and drive away to work but finally I better thought of checking were it was coming from. Initially I thought it was going to be one of the blower fans in the engine. I put my ear close and my hand where the fans are and I couldn’t hear or feel the vibrations of the fan at the same frequency than the strange noise. I kept listening and the noise seemed to come from the right hand side part of the engine from the bottom. This was now quite suspicious so I decided to turn off the engine. What was my surprise and panic when the noise was still there after turning off the engine. What could it be? After a few seconds I knew, it must be the starter motor! Only way to stop it? Unplug the battery so I did and the starter stopped turning. I was relieved when I saw that at least the noise didn’t have a live of its own and that it depended on the battery (how could have been otherwise?)

I raced the car to the Madrid OPC to fix/replace the starter (taking the car out of a second floor underground parking was another adventure!) and they had bad news for me. The starter needed replacing and they didn’t have any. They had to order it from Germany and that meant some weeks without the car when I was going to take holidays that Friday! They told me that they checked with BOSCH as it is a unit of that brand and they didn’t have one either. I decided to do my own research. I found a web page from BOSCH where you can get all the BOSCH part numbers for a 964 or any other vehicle.  I got the starter motor number and I called BOSCH in Madrid. They had the part although reconditioned and I could get it that same afternoon! Obviously I got it, delivered to them the old starter and had the car with me the following Monday, I had lost two days of holidays but not the whole week as I would had lost if I hadn’t done my own research. In total 600 Euros.

The next failure was the steering rack seals. After a day out driving through 3 mountain passes with many 180 degrees turnings the power-steering pump started doing a horrible noise when turning and the steering went very hard (actually it was quite a nice feeling at high speeds and not too bad for parking). I returned to Madrid and took the car to the OPC on Monday. The diagnosis was that the steering rack seals had failed letting all the liquid out. Thus the lack of power-steering and the horrible noise from the pump working with just air. The steering rack needed to be replaced or reconditioned (much faster again than waiting for the part from Germany and half the price). Also a crown in the spoiler mechanism had failed. This meant that the only way to raise the spoiler was for my girlfriend to turn the spoiler knob and me raising by hand the spoiler a bit so the motor could catch it and fully raise it. This was very annoying as every time that I stopped it went down again. Is there an easy way to leave the spoiler up always? In Madrid the poor spoiler is going up and down too often as reaching more than 80km/h and then stopping in a traffic light is “flowing” with the traffic here. The total bill was this time for 766 Euros including suspension geometry necessary after changing the steering rack.

I also did recently the service, total 1,695 Euros what means a grand total of 3,061 Euros for the first 4 months of 2002!

Unfortunately, while the car was in the OPC they made a big scratch on the rear bumper so I’ll have to take the car again to them so they fix what they damaged, for free of course! I hope this will be the last time I have to take it to the OPC at least till the next service.

Some times I think of changing to a newer, more powerful late model 993 but I think I will feel really sad when I loose that characteristic front look with the big protuberant “eyes” (lights) that was somewhat lost with the 993 and totally destroyed with the 996 (a real shame!). Another option is to get a well sorted prepared 964 like the one featured in the May magazine. I know many people will not like this, but I truly think that the 964 is the last real 911 although I still can live with a 993 especially if it is a biturbo! That’s my objective before I’m 35 . About a 996? May be when I get very old I’ll buy one instead of a Mercedes.

On Saturday 18th of May I’m going to the Regularity Rally organised by the Porsche Club España and the next day to the Spanish GT Championship invited by the Porsche Club and an inversion bank to be at the boxes. I’ll let you know in my next report how it went.