Not all was well with our CLK’s roof, but it eventually worked out in BEN’s favour

Things don’t always go smoothly in the motor trade and as our 911 for 2011 campaign continues we’ve certainly discovered that.

First a quick recap of where we are. At the beginning of December we invested £6k of the kitty we’d topped up with the sale of the Mazda MX-5s into a Mercedes CLK240 convertible.

Marshall Motor Group’s chief exec Daksh Gupta sourced us the car from his Mercedes Benz of Bolton site and we picked it up before the snow fell. Santa’s visit got in the way of putting the car up for sale so it didn’t move until the beginning of January when we decided to get the car on Auto Trader.

After a thorough valet we took it for some pictures, but when we went to put the roof down nothing happened. This was not good news. After some detective work we found the hydraulic fluid level was well below minimum so topped it up – sadly all that achieved was to make our wallet £20 lighter.

Former Merc salesman Dunc was dispatched to pull in a favour at his old stomping ground. After some diagnostic work and two mechanics’ opinions we were no closer to fixing the fault – and they’d only probe it further if we started to shell out. Enter old friend Matt Kendell of MX-5 fixing fame. He took the car away and spotted a bracket had broken. £120 later he’d replaced that – but still it refused to work. Further investigation found a leaking hydraulic pump. They certainly don’t make Mercs like they used to…

There was some good news among all this, though. Kendell’s receptionist’s mum wanted to buy the CLK and a deal was struck for £8,250 dependent on us fixing the roof. That meant every penny spent out was profit slipping through our fingers. This left us in a bit of a conundrum. The last thing we wanted to do was go back to Marshall and moan. They had done us a huge favour by letting us have the car for £6k in the first place, so we decided not to bother them.

‘But Banks wouldn’t let BEN go without, sending us a cheque by return post’

But Marshall still heard about the saga on the grapevine (Twitter) and were soon on the phone offering to fix it. By this stage we’d already paid out for the work – £698.22 in total. Mercedes Benz of Bolton boss

Andy Banks couldn’t be more apologetic when he called.

‘Andy, these things happen and with the 911 for 2011 challenge we knew we’d have to take the rough with the smooth – this is in no way your fault,’ we explained. ‘We didn’t want to bother you with it because that would have just been unfair.’

Banks was having none of it – he insisted on paying for the repairs so BEN wasn’t out of pocket. To be honest, we felt guilty accepting the cash – we know if we’d been doing this in ‘real life’ we would have had to take the hit. But Banks wouldn’t let BEN go without, sending us a cheque by return post, reserving his place – and Marshall’s – in heaven.

In fact, thinking about it, without the problematic roof we’d never have taken the car to Kendell’s and it would never have found its new owner. Every cloud and all that… Now we just need to find something to spend our cash on next!

THE STORY SO FAR…