BEST OF BREED
It was the end of a long day. We’d been carrying out back-to-back appraisals of a cross section of 996-generation 911s at Porsche sales and customisation specialist, Paul Stephens, when I’d noticed a fetching 986 Boxster S in the company’s stock. This car, I surmised, would do very well for Mrs T. While snapper, Antony Fraser, finished up, Paul handed me the Boxster keys and off I went for a whizz around our twisty south Suffolk test route. “That,” I said when I got back to the workshop, “is the best car I’ve driven all day!” I handed over a deposit on the spot. You would’ve, too.
That was eight years ago. Mrs T loved the car, and we had at least one trans-Continental foray to our Portugal gaff in it. What made this Boxster a cut-above was 550 Spyder 50th Anniversary specification, making it a special edition released in 2003 and finished exclusively in Carrera GT silver with anthracite wheel spokes. The car’s sweet spec was burnished with tweaked ECU, 5mm wheel spacers and a 10mm drop in ride height. A spec so together that, three years ago, when I decided to consolidate my personal transport inventory and ditch the 911s, I opted to buy a 986 Boxster S to call my own. I was determined to emulate Mrs T’s Anniversary model. With 40k miles clocked, not to mention a tight service history carried out by Porsche Centre Exeter and SCS Porsche of Honiton, my new toy was immaculate, if a
