Boxster Gets An Overdue Service

Brett Fraser removes head from sand and confronts the various issues with his Boxster S, just not all at once though! First on the agenda is to replace ragged front tyres and brake discs.

As regular readers will already have surmised, I have a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards car servicing. I’m not ignorant to the wisdom of regular servicing as preached in this magazine and many others. It’s simply that there’s another maxim that I follow more avidly – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. My brother’s old Toyota Hilux pickup made it to 350,000 miles in his horribly abusive hands with no servicing – he just topped up the oil and replaced worn-out parts – so I know it can be done. I also know that it isn’t really all that sensible…

The Boxster had started sending out its own little signals that it would appreciate some decent attention. It wasn’t accelerating as smoothly as normal and the idle was lumpier than it had been. The brake pedal had grown soft underfoot and the gearshift was becoming more and more recalcitrant when cold. And then the rear lower corner of the hood on the driver’s side detached itself from the rubber seal that sits just below the bodywork along a two-inch section. All these things had sort of crept up on me; one day, though, I noticed them as one, large ugly package of neglect and realised that the time had come to do something about them. Especially as the Boxster’s mileage is now galloping along the final furlong towards 100,000.