Should the cap be dry.......yes. Time to replace.......without any history why not.

I did alittle legwork looking for a distributor cap and rotor in Pelicans catalog and a couple of their competitors online catalogs....which I won't mention because the mods will just delete the names....and the fact that you have a 230e Euro resulted in nary a single hit for those parts. I don't know the parts availability for Euro models so that doesn't mean they aren't out there. Hopefully someone with that knowledge will chime in with some info.

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'89 260e (212K Mi.), '92 400e (208K Mi.), '92 400e (not a misprint) (146K Mi.), '95 C220, '81 240D--Sold