Had been meaning to re-read your lambo thread to be fair to get a flavour of it (and remind myself of your exhausts noise
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I have actually driven a 360 and a Gallardo but it was a long time ago on a pretty awful airfield experience day with hammering rain. I did prefer the Gallardo then from memory but the 360 had nearly no grip probably from crap tyres and slippery track etc.
The other argument is that a v10 manual R8 would leave enough in the pot to go on a continental roadtrip as well as purchasing the car
Yeah I keep an eye on a couple of the Supercar selling groups, have seen you pop up on there occasionally actually. I'm not really put off by mileage but conscious when it comes to any potential resale time the mileage does come into it. Likewise on the colour I really want red, black or yellow but fully appreciate red will be the easier colour to move on in the future. Honestly won't personally consider the pale silver ones as whilst they look good the colour just blends in too much to normality
I need to book a day off work really to have a drive around various dealers and decide what the end goal actually is. Are test drives relatively easy to sort in your guys experiences? When I was viewing interesting stuff at the £20k mark 5-6 years ago I really struggled as a lot of dealers refused test drives without deposits - I literally walked away from an ideal manual 996T because the dealer wouldn't let me test drive without putting a £500 deposit into their account despite showing them I had more than the asking price sat in my bank account.
Negotiation wise I imagine the sticker price isn't what most of these cars actually sell at? I've got full access to Cap which helps with that side of it to be fair
I have never had issue with test drives really. I think the only issue I ever recall was Audi, me and my mate went in their car shopping for him, guy is a millionaire and when looking at Audi R8 V10's the sales guy seemed to think we were rebel scum and suggested we should be looking at Audi TT's or RS3's and not their 120k car, needless to say we left and my mate put a letter of complaint in along the lines he could buy most the stock they had in their dealership, they were apologetic but in the end they killed his interest in the car.
Apart from that Lamborghini, Porsche and Ferrari seemed more than welcoming and eager to put me into cars for test drives. When I was Porsche hunting Wilmslow let me take out several cars and then they said one of our race instructors is here if you want to go out with him in a C2S and C4S to see differences, of course I said yes and he had going extremely fast and explaining the behaviour differences between the cars. Though I did not buy a car from them I did buy an OPC 2yr warranty and I did use them for all my servicing, they were fantastic.
Lamborghini were more than happy to let me drive Huracan, Performante and Uris, the guy was pretty nuts but was extremely accommodating and it made the weekend great fun, and the coffee is fantastic. He even started up the SVJ they had in the showroom and proceeded to rev it in the show room, lets just say is colleagues were not best please but us as potential customers were buzzing. I turned up in a Skoda Yeti so I doubt it had anything to do with car.
Ferrari both Wilmslow and Swindon were also just as accommodating with test drives, basically I like the look of this, OK sir lets take it out. I did go in F-Type and they new it was a P/X potentially so maybe it helped but I genuinely think the supercar dealerships do not get as much interest as like say a Ford dealership so they are far more welcoming to test drives, I guess if your 18 they might ask questions but if your 25+, even better 30+ I think they will be very accommodating.
The only disappointment was Mclaren Manchester/Wilmslow they would not let me test drive the 570S I was interested in buying on the basis it was a used pre-owned car and they did not want the hassle of getting it out, so I asked to drive a demonstrator and they did not have one, luckily I was able to access one via a friend of a friend, but needless to say Mclaren Wilmslow only really seemed interested in telling me how awesome they are but not actually letting me drive anything. So had a look around, sat in a few cars thought to myself 570S Spyder lots of down sides, but lots of positives so will maybe get in one of those one day. When Mclaren came to OcUK (engineers) they had no issues letting me sit and have a go in their 600LT test vehicle.
Ferrari Manchester/Wilmslow would not budge on the black 458 I was very keen on buying, it was missing some carbon interior stuff so I was after a discount but in the end they would only offer to retrofit fit carbon paddles for free (£1000 to buy), I wanted more and I knew they had the car for sale over six months but had noticed when they first got the car it had no carbon and Pzero tyres, whereas when I looked at it then it was on PS4S and had carbon centre console so they had already put some updates to make it more desirable, they'd also not do any lower than around 6.5% APR so they were simply not giving me the deal I wanted and their service / labour cost seemed very high, they wanted £760 to fit a set of spark plugs.
Dick Lovett Swindon went above and beyond, unlimited coffee and biscuits, even offers of lunch, I also got nearly £10,000 off the advertised price and they got the APR to low 5's and the same spark plug job they did for £270 and since owning the car their service and support has being excellent, highly recommend them.
The couple of specialist I test drove 458's at were a bit less accommodating mainly because the cars were mostly SOR, the cars also did not drive as well, maybe because of lack of PPI, as I know Dick Lovett spend around £75000 on PPI on my car, new pads all round, new sensors, full front-end respray and full gearbox and diff oil change. The specialist were also unwilling to move on price.
Lamborghini certainly seemed to be more accomodating on moving on price by the tune of upto around 10k too. Try your luck, I got very lucky with my car because the salesman was like I've literally had a guy trying to email and buy the car, but we told him first come first served, I thought it was a blagging attempt until he showed me the email he had received that morning and once I had it one of the other guys I spoke to when I took it in for a service said after you took that car we had 2-3 people trying to call and buy it, so my timing was strong, again I though maybe blagging until a few post on PH and one guy saying that I beat him to it. So I got very lucky to not only get it but to also bag a discount too. But the specification is bang on and if you like yellow then its a winner especially as its the £18k paint option and most potential buyers want the carbon buckets, forged wheels and carbon driver zones and carbon wheel, they tend to fetch a solid 20k more than say a car without. Not sure if I mentioned but they even tried to buy the car back off me just over a month ago because they had a customer after it and they offered me 139k cash before negotiating, which means they no doubt had a customer for it at around 150-160k.
