Classifieds' Car Of The Day: Now's The Time To Buy A Bargain Boxster

It's official: if you want to get yourself a bargain Porka, it doesn't have to be a ratty old 944. Prices of early 2.5-litre Boxsters are now temptingly cheap, and if you're careful, they make a brilliant used car purchase.

The 2.5-litre, mid-mounted flat-six found in early Boxsters cranked out 204bhp, which gives the Porsche a 0-60mph time of 6.7 seconds, and a top speed of 149mph. Sure, that's hardly blistering, but it's a sweet-sounding, punchy engine. Couple that to the fact that the well-balanced Boxster is a damn good steer, and you have a great budget sports car package.

So, what's the catch? Well, Porsche parts aren't what you'd call cheap, and that mid-engined layout makes the powerplant tricky to access for some jobs. There's also a number of potentially expensive faults that can occur on these cars; the scariest (and pricest) being the failure of the IMS bearing. There's little you can do about the latter issue, but owner experiences suggest IMS failures are actually quite rare, and usually occur at lower mileages.

With that in mind, this 132,000 mile example should be safe from the dreaded IMS fault. That's a high figure to have on the clock, but it looks like a clean example, coming with full service history.

If you do your research and are prepared to be a little more hands on with the maintenance, you can't go wrong for the cash.