-alan-
pfm Member
I did have a chance at getting a cheap 308 a few years back but was strongly advised not to by every car trade contact I have. I heeded the advice.
That reminds me of the old quip about the definition of an optimist being somebody who thinks he can just about afford to run a second hand Aston Martin
I do know of one of the local chaps here who used to run and fettle one of the later F360 cars. Some of the OEM parts costs were horrendous, but being a resourceful type, he used to find workarounds like instead of shelling out whatever ridiculous sum the official suppliers were looking for something like a replacement radiator cooling fan - he would dismantle the problem part to find out who made the individual bits, and in that case (I think) sourced the individual electrical and fan components directly from Fiat and Bosch.
As an aside btw - one of the other head-scratching things he had to resolve was why the testers could not get a satisfactory reading off the automated suspension test equipment at the local MOT/NCT centre, and twice issued it with a fail notice. Turns out the 360 was one of the earliest road cars fitted with active suspension, and the car was varying the damping rates doing its level best to fight back against the unusual inputs it was seeing at the wheels. Simple solution was to tell them to switch the engine off before they ran the test. All good