About a year ago, the CEO of Porsche Cars North America said that "Our entry model is our pre-owned program." That's no longer just true of Porsche. The median age of a registered car on American roads is now 11.5 years old, and that number has been climbing at a record pace. As a consequence, we no longer consider a ten-year-old car to be "old", and the market reflects this. That's even true of brands that have, shall we say, troubled reputations for durability. Back in 1996, I bought a low-mileage 1986 Jaguar Vanden Plas with wire wheels and a folder full of maintenance records for $4200. Today, a decade-old top-end Jag sedan will cost you most of twenty grand, maybe more.

Add all of that up, stir in the often-superior "analog" driving experience of cars from before the millennium, and it's no surprise that automotive enthusiasts are finding themselves making payments on cars that would have been considered junkyard fodder by previous generations. We're spending good money on everything from Nineties Integras to C4 Corvettes, and we expect that those cars will impress us the same way they impressed the autowriters when they were new. Yet more often than not our pre-owned dream cars are sloppy, noisy, and frustrating to drive. This is particularly true if you're a trackday driver or autocrosser; chances are you're going to be really disappointed the first time you hustle that vintage NSX or M5 around Laguna Seca or VIR. What's going on?

Your humble author got a trial-by-fire education on the misery of "racing" an old car back in 2004. My plan was to run the '05 One Lap Of America in one of my high-school dream cars: a Cosworth-powered 1986 Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3-16. I made the acquaintance of a respected M-B tech and restoration specialist, and we found an example with 234,000 miles on the odometer. The body was clean and rust-free. It started and ran. The interior looked presentable. I bought it for six grand.

How'd it drive? Like an Econoline van from the Seventies.

How'd it drive? Like an Econoline van from the Seventies. The old Benz felt like it had been glued together from spaghetti. I couldn't figure out why this was so. After all, the car was a two-owner creampuff with no expense spared on the maintenance. Any time it had broken, it had been fixed properly. I didn't know it then, but I was about to enter the Ozone Zone.

Ozone, as you probably know, is what happens when three oxygen molecules decide to hang out. If you breathe enough of it, you'll die. Luckily for us, there isn't that much of it out there. There is, however, enough ozone out there to attack the rubber parts in your vintage car. Ozone causes rubber to harden, crack, disintegrate, and flake away. A 1986 Mercedes-Benz is chock-full of rubber bushings, hoses, and parts. All of which were crumbling out from under me. If I wanted to run this car for 3,100 miles and twelve three-lap racetrack sessions in the course of a week—which I most definitely did—I was going to have to replace all of that rubber.

Where we could, we replaced the rubber with polyurethane, which is more stable and which doesn't crumble over time. (My NASA race car, and most people's race cars, have poly bushings everywhere.) Where polyurethane wasn't available, we swapped in new rubber parts. Where there was no brand-new rubber part available, we bought what we could get and crossed our fingers. The 190E got a "nut-and-bolt" job, disassembled and put back together to factory spec.

What did all of this cost? About twelve thousand dollars—in parts, not labor. That's what it took to make a twenty-year-old sedan feel like a new one when you were behind the wheel. How'd we do? Well, we finished as high as 51st out of 100 in the various track events. The Benz ran slow, posting a 17.5s quarter-mile in my hands, but it ran secure and steady. During the "transit" sections between tracks, we could occasionally tap the '130' mark on the speedometer.

After more than three thousand miles, I had a lot of respect for that little car. It wasn't truly as good as it had been the day it left the factory; the seats were thrashed, the engine was down on power despite all our efforts, and even after I got used to the "dogleg" shift pattern it was always difficult to change gears quickly, thanks to worn synchros. Still, spending twelve grand on a six grand car gave me a vague sense of what it had probably been like to drive it fast when it was brand new.

I sold the Cosworth to a fellow who used it as a commuter car for a few years, and it rusted out from under him. It went through a few low-quality owners before landing in the hands of the fellow who has it now. He and I have emailed a few times. He knows that he has a true project on his hands. Many of those bushings and rubber parts need to be replaced again, and there's now enough oxidation in the unibody to require an all-hands-on-deck effort if the 190E is ever to be driveable again.

Trust me, you don't want some random bushing to collapse the rest of the way and violently change your suspension alignment at high speed.

Every time I see something tempting like a '95 Corvette Grand Sport on eBay or Craigslist, I have to take a breath and think about that old Benz. Unless it's been stored in rather particular conditions, the way my old Porsche 993 has been, chances are that an old Vette or something like that would make a decent daily driver but a nightmare track rat. Trust me, you don't want some random bushing to collapse the rest of the way and violently change your suspension alignment at high speed. There's nothing for it but to spend the money and time putting it back to the way it was in the showroom.

Very few people do stuff like that. They'll fix the engine and they'll repair body damage, but I never see a Craiglist ad with a line like "new transmission mounts." It's a shame, really, because unless you get those little wear items up to spec you'll never know what the car was like when it was in the showroom. Instead, you'll get the sloppy used-car experience, which will lead to you making Internet forum posts like, "I don't see what the big deal was about the old full-size Impala SS. I drove one the other day and it was a hot mess."

Yesterday I had a meeting with a fellow who kept talking about "ka-veets." It took me a solid hour to realize he was saying caveats. As in, Latin for "beware." So. If you buy an old performance car but you don't bother to get those bushings and mounts and belts and hoses fixed, then trust me, you will have some ka-veets. If you can't deal with that, then you could always go buy a nice new entry-level car with a manual transmission. Something like a Civic or a Veloster. Just don't complain when you get blown into the weeds by an old 350Z with rubber flakes in its wake, okay?

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io