Gary R.

Or a cheater motor for a couple grand!

Racerrob

If you just want to be on the grid, maybe a grand. There are numerous 20K motors in cup. A good rebuild is 5-10 depending on parts and the builder.

I would love to switch to SBOX but not if it means a motor/year.

FredC

It has to be like other classes... With top builds fetching 2X lower end cars... I have seen som 25k specimens, so I won't be surprised to see 40k spec boxsters....

mooty

if you were to have a pro shop build you a car from scratch, a nice winning car, you provide no labor no parts, and i mean a legal car, no cheating parts, i be EXTREMELY surprised if you can find a car less than $40k ready to go.

my was WAY WAY WAY more than $40k, but it was probably one of the nicest legal cars i have seen and won more than 50% of the races it entered, otherwise 2nd, unless you count the time i killed the gearbox and flew off buttonwillow heehee, but i was in the lead when i flew off. werkstatt probably seen the car by now and i think you would say it pretty damn nice (Craig's car now)

Werkstatt

For a reliable well done and sorted Boxster you are looking at $35,000, for $40,000+ you get just about everything on the car. For $25,000 you get a car that you will now need to put another $10,000 in to make it nice, 30 years ago racing motorcross we called these Rat Bikes, depends what you want. You guys are making more about the engine issue than there is, sure sometimes they go. I have more friends launching Cup engines than Spec Boxsters. You can internet/soap box race all you want, I suggest you get one and join the fun.

mooty

larry, there are a lot of 3500-4000 motors from wreck yard at least all through out last year.

your are right though, the build cost of BSR is not low. if you dont do all the work. i think some ppl think BSR as SM. but it aint so. it's cheap compared to CUP cars. many BSR driver in CA all came from cup cars. so by cheap, it is relative. 944 is cheaper so is honda challenge and the S2000 are much much faster then BSR. SM is even cheaper.

if a shop tell you they can build a car for 35 or less, they are full of it. i want PREMIUM parts. my seat alone is $2500 (one seat), i dont want a $500 POS to plant my *** on. i dont want a car gutted poorly, it needs to look like a factory cup car. so everyone has different standard. my hardtop was not painted at maaco but had a $800 paint job solid color and just the top.

but the racing is really fun. at least in norcal we have had 6 races and most of them we were bumper drafting each other. i dont see other classes running that close. although i didn't feel it, i swear my car has paint that wasn't there BEFORE the race ;-)

i know TX had several blown motors. we dont see too many of that in CA. but other than CA motor spdway, we dont have banked tracks. so that may be the reason, i dont know. all i can say is that i have tortured my BSR motor a LOT LOT harder than any of my GT3's and it had zero issues.

larry, the coments above aren't directed at you, but once i started typing, i didn't want to start another post so ....

i sold my BSR... midlife crissis and bought a lot of other cars, toys trailers. i may build another BSR, who knows.

mooty

right on...
maybe you can talk to craig to sell me the car back hahahaha

VB997

As it turned out, this was the actual sequence of events:

A random customer of a Porsche repair shop blows an engine, that engine goes to Porsche as a core and a “remanufactured engine” comes back and goes back into the customer’s car. Thirty thousand miles later that engine comes out and goes into a built Spec Boxster that had a blown engine (a roller race car)… it goes up for sale with an ad that says “New Remanufactured engine”…I answered the ad, had the normal pre sale conversation and during the sales cycle I’m told it’s a “crate engine with zero miles”, I buy the car sight un seen based on the various conversations and some e-mail pictures. I find out after I purchased the car what had actually transpired…I wasn’t happy because I really didn’t see how you could represent your ad like that. I start getting e-mails about this post outlining this transaction and the “crate engine” when it went up and I really didn’t want to be here but….it’s just my personal opinion, but I think it’s Kind of a stretch to call it a crate engine and say it has zero miles on it just because “you didn’t race it”…additionally, I’ve put fifteen thousand dollars into this car to make it the “race ready” car I purchased but that’s another story and way more subjective to what I would call race ready…well, more over what my tech’s would call a race ready Spec Boxster. So yea, admittedly, I’m a little bitter on this whole crate engine BS…

As for the wheels he references…

So how do you unscrew a deal like this? I have a car that we disagree on and I’m in Virginia and he’s in Texas and I didn’t see us doing a refund…so I offered a compromise with a fair valuation. I have a large fleet for my business and we lease the vehicles. When you buy mileage going in it’s usually .10 per mile and if you go over its .15 coming out of the lease. In this case, I used 30,000 miles (the number of miles over zero miles on the engine) and figured roughly that we were conservatively three grand apart on the deal…I took a complete set of used OEM Boxster wheels/tires as a settlement. As far as I was concerned this was dead….until this post, the e-mails from friends and the spin of what really happened.


The car is straight now but I’d sell it tomorrow as I hate even looking at it. I have bought and sold well over a half a million dollars worth of race cars since I joined PCA in 1996 and never had a situation like this before with a seller or a buyer…


This was the ad I answered:

Built by Topp Racing in Cresson, Texas. New remanufactured engine from Porsche. Cobra Suzuka seat with 6 point Schroth harness. Fast cool shirt system with blower. Built to Spec with current logbook.

http://www.boxsterspec.com/boxstersp...box-t5091.html

mooty

oh, it's not just couple grand.
it's about $8000, with core exchg.
too rich for me.

mooty

i sold my for $35 or so i think. it inc 3 sets wheels, recardo xl spg hans seat, 2 exhausts, aim data and a cheap computer to run the program, cool suit, fire system and the other more usual stuff.

blair also had a top car for about the same price

TIM COSTA

Larry,
Ive purchased 2 donor Boxsters in the last 6 months and both were under $4000. Both cars ran but needed "attention". The car that Werkstatt just finished for me cost $3500 and I bought an updated, 42k mile motor for $3000, and the guy through in the tranny, ECU, immobilizer and the keys. They're out there you just have to look.
Remember when you learned how to swim everyone said "just jump in and the rest will come to you"...that scared the crap out of me.. good thing there was a life guard on duty!!!

Cory M

$33-40k

amondc

Depends on what you consider well sorted...some people sell "well sorted" cars that need another 10k to fix for $35k, others sell well sorted cars that don't need work for $35k.

syncspeedinc

I am building a SPBOX, and I started with a decent '98 donor with 44K on the clock, very nice inside and a newish top for under $9500 a month ago, I saw some rough ones for less. My thought is that I can sell off the inside stuff to cover some smaller costs, I am doing everything on the car myself other than the cage ( Piper in April) , and I am able to transfer some of the stuff off my last race car into this one, such as Data, coolsuit, AMB trans.... and my hope it to keep it under $25K and I am not cutting corners. To be perfectly honest, I never keep a tally of my costs on these project for the standard and obvious reasons. I am not sure that I agree at all with the "motor a year" statement made above, there just is not the data to support that theory at all. Tim, you really are the master at hunting down these cars and parts, I look forward to mixing it up this year with you.

mglobe

Agree on that. Also, a lot of folks who talk about water cooled engine failures tend to ignore what an air-cooled rebuild costs.