Hey, it's quite a well known scam that I should have cottoned on to sooner. One distracts you asking about the spare wheel, whilst his friend puts dirty oil in the coolant, then the other distracts you asking about the engine, whilst one squirts something up the exhaust. You go for a test drive and 'oh no, it's broken, sell it to me cheap'.
I know they did it, because there's fresh dirty oil sat on top of my header tank, that wasn't there 30 minutes before they showed up. Whatever they put in my exhaust had a slightly sweet, 2 stroke oil smell, so clearly nothing that would come out of the car normally.
I was a qualified motorcycle mechanic but I'm disabled, and can't work on my own cars any more. The car is SORN and uninsured, due to me swapping to another car just before lock down. So I've either got to find an mobile mechanic who can fix it on the drive, or as I'm doing right now, try and sell the POS for a grand and just cut my loses.
I was wondering, as this is a common scam, if anyone had figured a way to deal with it easily. If skimming the tank, or isolating, removing, cleaning and replacing the header tank would be an option, because I can't crawl under the car and drop the coolant.