Buy a $10,000 Sh*tbox

This is my favourite type of car. Cheap, cheerful, and fun. To me nothing quite says “car enthusiast” more than buying someone else's bucket of problems. Which is why our recent video about three 10k sports cars was ultra refreshing to me. Like jumping into a cold lake. Or hearing Mark Hamill shit on The Last Jedi.

The “$10,000” sports car used to be the “$5,000” but times have moved on and bananas cost $237 a bunch so it is what it is. Nevertheless, I’m still very interested in seeing what you can get when you “sort by lowest price first.” But I only recently discovered WHY I like discovering these cars. It isn’t to save money obviously. If that was the case, I wouldn't have sold my Miata and bought two Italian cars. No, it’s because in the fully depreciated pool of sports cars you literally never know what you're going to get. And you never actually get what you think.

I’d like to say that as you buy more and more cheap cars, you get better at it. That's simply not true. Well, maybe it is for some people, but I suck at it just as much as I always have. My first E46 BMW, a silver 325i sedan, was brilliant. I loved it. I loved it so hard I moneyshifted it and blew up the engine at a time attack event. Then, after swapping a 330i engine into it, I discovered it was too rusty to be worth saving. 

Unfortunately,the rust just wasn't something I knew how to look for properly when purchasing. It was hidden, like all good Ontario rust is. Water got into the chassis by means of various over-engineered Germain drain passages, and never got out. Because the over-engineered German drain passage drain holes had been blocked by leaves. So it rotted from the inside out. 

Ever feel  “your heart sink”? I have. It was when I curiously poked around a perfectly good looking rocker with my finger and punched right through with zero effort. Except while most people’s hearts probably sink down, mine sort of sunk to the side because I was laying on the ground of my cold garage, in February. It was a position I stayed in for a while staring at the hole in disbelief hoping the freezing concrete would numb my emotions.

I attempted to fix that car, but as I cut away the rocker I realized the rust stretched up into all the wheel arches. I removed enough rusted body that it looked like there was more gone than remained, so I scrapped it and bought another E46. A 325ci (coupe). On this one I had learned my lesson and when I went to inspect it, I laid on the ground in the rain in some lady's driveway banging on the underside with a screwdriver until I was satisfied. I still race that E46 to this day.

The truth is though, I still got lucky. I got lucky with the 330i engine I swapped into the second E46 too. I bought it from some random dude in the middle of the night in a truck yard for 300 bucks. It has since spent 4 seasons of racing living at 7000 rpm and refuses to quit.

I got UNlucky however with my most recent Alfa Romeo purchase which is currently being, (no other word for it) restored. The only difference is I’ve just scaled up the cost of my misjudgements to a higher price bracket. 

There are of course measures you can take to find out if a potential car purchase is a good one. You can do a compression test, oil analysis, have a shop do a full ppi, but we’re not talking about buying a used 911 for 60 grand from a gentleman named “Henry”, we're talking about buying a clapped out sub-10k G37 from a kid named “Dylan.” You probably aren't going to go to the trouble of towing that pile to a shop and paying for a full inspection, and he's probably not going to let you drive it there because “bro I’ve got like 5 people coming today that know what it's worth.”

So inevitably you are just going to buy it. And you know what? That's part of the fun. You probably only test drove it for a couple min, and then laid on the driveway to look underneath. And you had to make your decision quickly because Dylan had to drive his mom to a medical appointment in another version of the exact same car he’s selling that definitely doesn’t indicate the one you are buying was originally purchased by him for parts.

So in that moment that you drive away with your purchase a week or so later, you feel this unique blend of excitement and fear. “What have I just done?” On your way home the car probably develops some unique and interesting issues that obviously never popped up on your test drive. You begin to learn its idiosyncrasies and faults. You join the reddit/facebook/forum groups and start asking questions so you can hear the magical phrase “learn to use the search function buddy” from your new group of friends. You start digging into potential mods or figuring out what you need to sort so you can get out and do a trackday, or try to drift it. You’ll likely find out that even though that car was supposed to come with a limited slip diff, somehow yours doesn't have one. 

Or maybe none of that is true, and you got an absolute peach. A perfect example that runs true for years to come. The $10k sports car is the Kinder Egg of the car world. 

It’s fun. It's an adventure. It’s what got me into cars in the first place.