A 2006 997.1 Carrera S manual with 66K miles just sold on Bring a Trailer for $42,500. The week before, a 2012 997.2 Carrera with 38K miles cleared $66,000 on Cars & Bids. Same wheelbase. Same flat-six layout. Both manuals. The 997.1 is the prettier car — and it’s trading $24K below its successor.

The Carrera S makes 355hp from a naturally aspirated 3.8 that, when properly sorted, is one of the great modern Porsche driving engines. Manuals are plentiful. Parts are cheap. PCA paddocks are full of them.

So why is it priced like a problem?

Two words: bore scoring.

The internet has spent fifteen years terrorizing 997.1 buyers with engine failure horror stories. Rennlist threads, YouTube teardowns, forum posts from 2009 that still rank on Google. The fear is real. The actual risk? Far more manageable than the noise suggests. And right now that fear is creating one of the better value windows I’ve seen in the 911 market in a while.

Here’s the data — and what to do with it.

Notable Porsche sales, April 23–29, 2026

The week’s standout: a 1997 993 Carrera manual with 109,000 miles clearing $172,000 on BaT. Six-figure mileage on a 993 used to cap prices in the high five-figures. Not anymore. Air-cooled scarcity is now strong enough to absorb miles the market would have penalized two years ago.

The two 997.1 Carrera S sales tell a strange story I’ll come back to in a minute: the PDK example outsold the manual. That isn’t supposed to happen on a 997.

The 996 Turbo at $89K is a 31K-mile, three-pedal example. Two weeks ago the same-spec car cleared $60K on BaT. The 996 Turbo floor is moving up.

→ Volume: 44 completed Porsche auctions across BaT, C&B, and PCarMarket in the last 7 days.

→ 997.1 CS manual premium just inverted: A 2006 PDK Carrera S (57K mi) outsold a 2006 manual Carrera S (66K mi) by $10K last week. That’s unusual. Eight 997.1 CS examples have cleared in the last 30 days, ranging $42K to $74K — median sale is $52K. The buyer pool has thinned, and shoppers are buying on condition and history, not pedal count.

→ 996 Turbo floor moved: Six 996 Turbo sales in the last 30 days. Three of the most recent four cleared $83K+, with low-mile examples touching $89K. Up from a $60-66K cluster in late March. This is a real bump.

→ Air-cooled re-rated: A 109K-mile 993 Carrera at $172K, a 94K-mile 1988 930 at $89K, and a 1972 911T at $81,750 all cleared in the last 7 days. The “low miles or it doesn’t sell” rule on air-cooled is officially broken.

→ 718 Spyder premium for low-mile: A 607-mile 2025 718 Spyder (PDK) cleared $210,000 on PCarMarket. The end-of-production firming on 718 is showing up in transaction prices, not just listings.

Let me give you the honest numbers, because what circulates online is not the full picture.

Bore scoring is a real failure mode. On 2005–2008 997.1 Carrera and Carrera S models, the Lokasil aluminum cylinder liners can develop vertical scoring marks — most commonly in cylinder 6 — when oil is diluted with fuel or moisture, or when service intervals are stretched too long. The open-deck crankcase design makes the 997.1 more susceptible than the 997.2, which moved to improved cylinder metallurgy and largely solved the issue.

Here’s where the internet gets it wrong: frequency.

Porsche’s own internal estimate puts bore scoring at around 10% of affected cars. Independent specialist data from the earliest affected build years (2004–2006) puts the real number closer to 5%. That means 90–95% of 997.1 Carrera S engines — properly maintained — will never score. The forums aren’t full of posts from people whose cars are running cleanly at 90K miles. Those owners aren’t typing. They’re driving.

Two things to know cold before you shop:

Turbo and GT3 variants are not affected. Different engine architecture entirely — the bore scoring conversation simply doesn’t apply to them. If you’re cross-shopping a 997 Turbo, this isn’t your concern.

The cars that score are almost always the neglected ones. Fuel and moisture contaminate the oil on short-trip, low-frequency cars. Extended oil intervals let degraded oil thin out against the cylinder walls. A 997.1 CS with documented 5K-mile oil change intervals, a functioning AOS (air-oil separator), and regular highway use is a fundamentally different risk profile than one with a spotty service history and 10K-mile intervals.

The buy protocol is simple: borescope during PPI. A competent Porsche shop scopes all six cylinders in under an hour. Cylinder 6 goes first — look for vertical scoring marks instead of smooth walls. A sooty driver’s-side exhaust tip before any other symptoms is an early tell. Clean scope on a car with tight service history is about as risk-cleared as a 20-year-old engine gets. The borescope costs around $300. An engine rebuild on a scored motor runs $10–20K depending on severity.

What this has created — and what the auction data confirms — is a meaningful discount on a car that doesn’t deserve one, for buyers willing to spend an afternoon on due diligence.

I’ve watched 997.1 Carrera S manuals with 45–70K miles trade in the $42-43K range across the last month. The 997.2 equivalent is $66K. Nothing about the driving experience justifies that spread. The fear does. And fear, eventually, fades.

The 997.1 CS window is open right now. A clean borescoped example in the $42–55K range, with documented service history, is one of the best pure driving values in the market. Not forever. But right now.

Three things I’m watching this week:

If you already own a 997.1 CS: Switch to Driven DT40 or DT50, cut intervals to 5K miles or annual (whichever comes first), and confirm your AOS isn’t weeping into the intake. That’s the maintenance case in its entirety. The cars that fail are the neglected ones.

Resource: LN Engineering has the most thorough free bore scoring reference online — covers diagnosis, prevention, and repair options. Bookmark it before your next PPI.

RennPulse — Porsche Market Intelligence, Every Tuesday
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