Buying a Supercar - Buyer's Guide

If you want to make owning a supercar an experience you’re willing to repeat rather than regret, it may be worth taking five minutes to read about what lies ahead.

1. Consider the running costs
In moments of weakness, you may consider it worth defying the credit crunch and all portents of financial doom to own a supercar and feel like a god, for however brief amount of time. That is before they take away your house and family. But don't worry, you can always get a new family, you can’t always get another chance at supercar ownership. Or should that be the other way round?

In all seriousness, it may sound obvious but you have to work out if you can really afford to own a supercar. Finding and buying one is the relatively easy part, it’s the running costs that can lead to financial ruin. Running costs are one of those very rare instances that can reduce grown men to tears and no where is this phenomenon more prevalent than in supercar ownership.

Supercars are generally engineered into a higher state of tune which means they’ll require more frequent service intervals to prevent everything from going foul. And when there’s a prancing horse or a raging bull on the bonnet, you know that service isn’t going to be cheap. Then there’s the fact you’ll be spending more money on fuel, insurance and rubber. And this is before your mechanic spots any faults. It’s a good idea to work out your intended annual mileage then factor in your supercar’s service arrangements and also set aside some money for a rainy day.

 
2. Join the Owner’s Club

Owner’s clubs aren’t just some geeky outlet for pedants to spend their Saturday afternoons talking about cylinder head serial numbers, they’re incredibly useful societies for any budding supercar owner. You should strongly consider joining an appropriate club, even before buying your supercar. Here, you’ll gain vital pieces of information about what is likely to go wrong, where’s best to get the car serviced and which insurance policy is cheapest. If you’re lucky, some particularly nice member may even come with you to check out the supercar you’re intending to buy.

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