I was planning to buy a car on Monday

"kanadanmajava1" (kanadanmajava1) 01/11/2016 at 16:47 • Filed to: None

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The winter has finally landed in Finland. My home town got a nice amount of snow and the temperature has dropped to low values. It’s now enough cold to keep the salt trucks off the road. So it would be really fun to go and practice some winter drifting (on empty and safe places of course). This is Finland so the whole purpose of winter is to go practice drifting when boring people go to watch the TV.

But my daily driver is an FWD car which is very boring during this time of year. During the weekend I checked out any nice RWD cars with a manual gearbox that would be for sale. I found some.

The first candidate was a low mileage Peugeot 505 GTi Break (with 8 seats and a manual). It was located quite far away and the seller didn’t even respond to my inquiries.

The next candidate was an E34 BMW 530i (V8) Touring (with a manual of course). It had semi high mileage but despite this it looked really good. I managed to contact the owner on Sunday and car seemed to be really promising. It was in nice color and it had velour seats. It lacked the LSD differential but that can be arranged later on. I agreed to go and see it on Monday. It was located only 10 km from where I live.

I usually don’t go just to see cars that are for sale but I go there to buy them. I remember only two cases when I went to see a car but I didn’t buy it (a rotten late model Renault 5 and ‘68 Dodge Monaco that was supposed to be good but it was actually completely brakeless). So now it was just the price that had to be negotiated with the seller.

But then my winter drift plans backfired. When I was calling about the meeting location the owner told me that the clutch pedal mechanism had failed in the morning and the pedal was stuck in the open position. I still went to see the car. It wasn’t in concourse condition but still pretty good. Interior was rather surprisingly nearly flawless. The rear hatch had a wiring harness problem that seemed to be very common with the E34 Touring models.

The owner wasn’t interested in selling the car before getting it fixed. I have bought many cars without test driving them so I was a bit tempted to make low ball offer and just tow it away. But I guess I have to wait for a while. If it wasn’t so cold I could fix the issue in the seller’s yard. Both clutch cylinders are quite cheap and easy to swap but I’m worried that the seller’s trusted mechanic might be very busy due to the winter.

Why did you fail me manuel? I trusted you! The season is now and not in the next month! My Tuesday was supposed to look like this.