£500 Challenge
Our S-class is fighting fit once more – but what’s that warning light on the dashboard?
Mercedes-Benz S280
DAVID SIMISTER The A1 on a Friday night isn’t my idea of fun. There are average speed cameras aplenty to contend with, lorries pull out on you in preparation for 51mph overtakes and there’s inevitably a 30-minute tailback caused by a caravan with a flat tyre. Not ideal when your overnight stay is 150 miles away.
But this time I wasn’t bothered, because I was back in our S-class. Our bargain Mercedes-Benz may have its little niggles but there few comfier places in which to lock the world outside. Just press a button to close the doubleglazed windows, stick the fourspeed auto into Drive and let the silky straight-six do the rest.
Only this time things were even better, because it was no longer stopping with the grace of Bambi on an ice rink or with a transmission that has trouble remembering which gear it should be in. Regular readers will recall that we took it to Justin Lazic of Classics Central, who reckoned he could help solve our Mercedes’ maladies. Which was how P772 LSR ended up heading to Sheffield to meet three-pointed-star specialist Leigh Holbrook, of The Only Way Is W123 (.com).
Normally the challenge of running an S-class on a budget would fall at the hurdle of parts prices, but Leigh had a solution. In the yard outside was an accident-damaged V12 600 SEL that’s no longer fit for the road but healthy enough to donate parts to our W140. So a retired bahnstormer ended up donating its front discs to our £500 car.
Leigh also replaced the front brake pads and wheel bearings, and identified the culprit behind our car’s confused transmission – a transmission selector bush had worn, telling the car it was in top gear when actually it was screaming along in third. That’ll explain the scary fuel consumption. Two days later our S-class was transformed, now able to shift seamlessly through the gears and throw out the anchors in a safe, controlled manner. On the drive back to our Peterborough office, Mike Le Caplain was won over by its now consummate road manners, and there followed a flurry of requests to borrow the car for the weekend. But I was so chuffed with it that I refused to relinquish the keys, pointing its nose back to the great north-west for another weekend. Conlusion: our newly mended S-class isn’t a rival for our ZR and Puma – it’s a rival for any brand-new Mercedes.
Except for the intermittent dashboard lights, that is. The ETS and ABS warning lights flicker on, but then they’ll disappear for hundreds of miles at a time. Justin and Leigh reckon the culprit is a faulty wheel sensor, a £200 fix the V12-engined donor can’t help with...