This post has been years in the making & I’m happy to share it. Where do I begin? Just like many of you, I have been a lifelong car enthusiast. I grew up around cars from as early as I can remember. My father is an automotive technician and my late grandfather owned his own auto repair & towing company. I can remember summers as a preteen spending time each day around my grandfather’s garage messing with cars & car parts. To this day, my father will talk about one time when I was probably 10 or 11yo, completely taking apart a starter and a carburetor (remember those), putting it back together & then one of the guys in the shop putting it back in the car they were working on & it worked like a charm.

To my mother’s dismay, I got my drivers license as soon as I turned 16. My first car in high school was a ’85 Pontiac Bonneville. My father bought it from a guy for ONLY $400, because it needed a new engine. Other than that it was in pretty good shape. The deal was, I had to come to work with my father everyday and help him put the car back together whenever he had some free time at work. DONE DEAL! My next car was a ’93 Nissan Altima. The deal then was since I was going away to college, I had to have at least a 3.5 GPA in my first semester and then I could have the car since they had already moved on to something else. 3.7 GPA my 1st semester, DONE!

I had that Altima until someone hit me and totaled it. Since I was still in college, I just took the payoff money and moved into a ’95 Altima. Upgrade baby…lol. I drove that until I graduated college & after working for a while I moved to a ’02 Infiniti I30. I only had the Infiniti for 2 years before I got the itch & moved to a ’04 Acura TL. This was around the time that I also got married. To this day, my wife still can’t believe that the Acura TL was the longest car I ever had, a whopping 6 years! This is when things began to shift upward. The Acura was paid for and I had the bright idea that it was time to shift to BMW. Only this time, I was going to order a car to my specs for the first time. I ordered a 2011 BMW 550i, Alpine White, Cinnamon interior w/ brush chrome accents. Very nice car!


After about 6 months of ownership of the 550, I decided to sell the Acura & look into getting a BMW 335i Coupe. So there I was back at the same dealership ordering another car. I had been reading about the 335i & watching tons of videos online (basically drinking the Kool aid). This was the final year under the E92 body style, still with hydraulic steering and all. I absolutely LOVED that car! The sound, the handling, the power delivery, everything was right up my alley. It was my daily driver for 3 years while the 550i was the weekend car. Driving the 335 ended up being much more fun than the 550i for obvious reasons. Although I loved the 550i & all that torque, the car always felt too quiet to me and not sporty enough for my taste. I was not willing to invest in the mods to make it more my taste since I knew it was not going to be a keeper anyway.



This is around the time that the BMW F80 M3 was coming out. I thought to myself that the M3 should give me just about everything that the 335 gave me, just turned up a notch. So after numerous test drives, I sold the 550 after 4 years of ownership and placed my order for a new 2016 Sakhir Orange M3 set for European Delivery & Performance Center redelivery. I won’t go into details about the ED or the PCD since this is a Porsche forum but suffice it to say that I have enjoyed the past 2 & half years of ownership with the M3.


If you are still reading, thanks for sticking with me, here comes the Porsche stuff. Despite all of this back story, along the way I was constantly looking over at the Porsche world and in the back of my mind I knew I would eventually get into one. I remember when I had my 550 going to dealerships to test drive various cars. Of course they made several attempts to get me to trade in the 550 to get me into a P car, but for several reasons I wasn’t quite ready at the time. When it was time for me to let the 550 go & I was considering the M3, I went back to the dealer (probably a different one) to test drive again what was the newest model. Because I really wanted to do a European Delivery at the time and I wasn’t ready to buy new from Porsche & do ED, I decided to go with the M3 and look up after a few years & see how I felt.

Around this time the .2’s were coming out, so I found myself at another dealership again to see what all of the fuss was about. I drove both the .2S & the .1S back to back & decided that for me, right now I wanted a .1 since I already have a TT car. So off and on for what has been probably about a year, I have been lurking here on Rennlist learning a ton from you guys & doing searches on autotrader, cars.com, cargurus etc. In having a conversation with a friend, I mentioned that my timeline was to purchase probably about a year from now after next winter. The problem is I didn’t ‘check out’ so to speak & stop ‘looking’ along the way. What that led to was November/December saying ‘yup after next winter’ to.....by the beginning of January I had already found what I was ‘not suppose to be looking for’, and made my deposit!

The car I found was 400 miles away from me in NC. Since I was buying sight unseen, the deal I locked in was contingent on a PPI being done. The PPI uncovered that the car was in great shape & only needed new tires, so part of the deal was the dealership had to buy and put on a new set of Michelin P4S. That helped to sweeten the deal knowing I was getting a brand new set of rubber & wouldn’t have to worry about that for a while. Before locking in the deal, I also posted in STG’s (great guy btw) HFS thread that I was looking at a car in NC and asked if anyone local was willing to lay eyes on the car for me to give it a once over and possibly take any pics for me. Dave ‘NCM’ responded and said he was willing to go check the car out for me. He was a life saver for being willing to do that. Having an objective eye look over the car was a big deal for me. On top of that, STG was able to put me in contact with the Sales Manager John Alvi at Leith Porsche who also personally looked over the car for me while it was getting the PPI done & called me to give me his input even though he had no ‘skin in the game.’ He even gave me some history on the car since it was originally purchased at that dealership by an older gentleman who has since passed away.

The car checked enough boxes for me so it was game on. ($130K build) Some of the options that I was considering were:
Must Have: White or SBM, PDK, SC, PSE, Sport design wheel w/ paddles, bose or burmester, park assist w/ camera, glass sunroof (I like the contrast), etc.
Would be nice:
Premium package plus (vented seats, entry & drive, & light design), Sport techno wheels,

Being the dead of the winter in the northeast, I told the dealer that I had no interest in picking up the car immediately since the weather can be dicey. I scheduled a Friday when I could free myself up from work and the weather looked good enough, so the wife & I grabbed some one way tickets to Raleigh. I flew out first thing in the morning, picked up the car & spent the afternoon road tripping it back home, while stopping for dinner in Baltimore. All & all it was an AWESOME experience & I am thrilled to now be apart of the 'club!' The addiction lives on!

And now on to some eye candy!

Pick-up day.



Some crappy iPhone pics.




Picking up the car from Dynamic Perfection in NJ, after having it paint corrected & ceramic coated.








If you have made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read a small portion of my car story. This is a great 'community' & resource, and I have learned a ton, so I figured if at least one person can relate, that makes it worth it to share. I will be updating with pictures along the way.

Car looks great !
Love the wheels & duck !

Cman21