Re: Renault 5 Turbo2
Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2015 3:07 pm
Dresden is a city with a name that is obviously indelibly marked in history and strangely it made me feel a bit nervous about going out there. It felt like a long way away. I nosed around the website and it all looked very professional - plenty of early 911 interest there - but still it felt a bit like "behind the iron curtain"
http://klassiker-handel.de/
Eventually I picked up the phone to speak to the dealer - or rather I tried to and discovered that his English was very poor. Seems that English is less widely spoken in the former East Germany and Jörg was definitely of the old school. He clearly seemed surprised to be hearing from someone in the UK as the car was only advertised on mobile.de and the language barrier became higher and higher as I probed for more info on the car. He wasn't the most responsive over email either and I began to realise that Google Translate was perhaps not the best tool for discussing turbo lag
In the end I enlisted the help of my brother who lives in Frankfurt to translate and craft emails for me...and things improved.
The car was only a 2 owner car - the first being Renault who seemed to have used the car as something of a 'team' car. Not a famous car, or a competition car (totally not enough BHP) or even a car that had been used in anger but one that appeared to be part of some PR machine around various events. I was quite happy with that. It had been supplied pearlescent white and resprayed in 1984 and all of the colour changes were paint, not stickers - always a good sign in my book.
The second owner
http://www.one-man-factory.de/
builds scale model cars of incredible detail which is exactly the kind of previous owner that, on paper, looks like a winner.
On paper that is....
http://klassiker-handel.de/
Eventually I picked up the phone to speak to the dealer - or rather I tried to and discovered that his English was very poor. Seems that English is less widely spoken in the former East Germany and Jörg was definitely of the old school. He clearly seemed surprised to be hearing from someone in the UK as the car was only advertised on mobile.de and the language barrier became higher and higher as I probed for more info on the car. He wasn't the most responsive over email either and I began to realise that Google Translate was perhaps not the best tool for discussing turbo lag
In the end I enlisted the help of my brother who lives in Frankfurt to translate and craft emails for me...and things improved.
The car was only a 2 owner car - the first being Renault who seemed to have used the car as something of a 'team' car. Not a famous car, or a competition car (totally not enough BHP) or even a car that had been used in anger but one that appeared to be part of some PR machine around various events. I was quite happy with that. It had been supplied pearlescent white and resprayed in 1984 and all of the colour changes were paint, not stickers - always a good sign in my book.
The second owner
http://www.one-man-factory.de/
builds scale model cars of incredible detail which is exactly the kind of previous owner that, on paper, looks like a winner.
On paper that is....