I Need Help, Dont Know What I Did To My Car While Racing!!

[davesilva]

Well here it goes guy's. Yesterday I was racing against a honda, on first gear at the take off, i smoked my tires and I was still at about 6000 rpms then all of a sudden my car started sputtering, and chocking. I stopped the car and started right up, but it the know it idles at 1000 rpm then shoots up to 2000 rpm, but when I try to rev it up, it just sputters and seems to want to shut off. I shift gear and the car takes off but sputtering and pushing. I thought it was the turbo, but I still here the Woosh after the shifting gears. What happend to my car.......please any info i would appreciate it. i HAVE A 99 passat 1.8 turbo.

David Silva

[LoChevy64]

Sounds like you are running a piston short. Pull the head and take a look.

[ernielist]

O thats a great. Yeah just go pull the head and assume that you are only running on 3 cylinder. If it were me I would do the following:

Do a compression test on all four cylinders, you should have good compression on all the cylinders (130 and up is pretty decent). If you do not have compression on any of the cylinders it is a good indication of a blown head gasket or other problems. You may also have water in the oil if your head gasket is blown and it will run like crap at idle but could smooth out when given power. You can also pop the radiator cap and have someone rev the engine while you watch the coolant flow inside. If you see bubbles in the coolant while your helper is revving the engine its a good sign that you have a blown head gaskaet (the bubbles are coming from the combustion leaking from the head gasket.). If you are losing water thats a good sign too. If you have bad compression on one cylinder it could be a leaking head gasket just in the area of that cylinder. If your rings are bad on your pistons the vehicle will usually blow blue smoke out of the tail pipe when you rev it and the compression will be low in some or all of the cylinders.

After you have done all of the above and verified that your motor is basicaly sound I would move to the ignition system. If you pull one wire at a time off the plugs and hold the plug close to a ground on the body, (use insulated gloves to keep yourself from getting zapped and dont stand in water lol) while it is inserted in the wire you should see the spark jumping the gap on the plug. Do this for all cylinders to verify you have spark. I am not sure if you have one coil per cylinder or what the setup is on your car, but you should be able to do this. You also have to verify you have enough spark to fire the cylinder. An easy way to do this is to hold each spark plug wire by a body ground and if the spark jumps 1/4 of an inch out of the wire you have pretty good spark.

If you do all that and you seem to have good ignition the next thing I would do is check to see if you are getting fuel. Obviously since it is running you are getting some fuel. You may not be getting enough. Do a little research on what fuel pressures you should have at idle and when revving. Get yourself a fuel pressure gauge and hook it into your fuel rail. Rev your motor up and check the fuel delivery to verify that your fuel pump is not working intermittantly and is delivering the correct PSI to the car.

If you verify that you are getting fuel and such I would then start looking at computer issues. Many of the sensors on this car can make it run like crap. I think autozone can pull the computer trouble codes for you for free, if not go to VW and have them do a diagnostic it usually runs about $85.00. If you have any sensor issues than this could be a good way to identify it. Replace any of the sensors that are listed to be in fault.

A few others things to check - Check your intercooler hoses and intake hoses and make sure they are all tight and that one of them didn't pop off when you were boosting. This will make it run like crap too because the engine will be sucking air and will not be able to meter it properly. You will usually hear a loud bang when an intercooler pipe pops off however. I would check all vaccuum lines for leaks, cracks and such. You can check the sahft play in your turbo as well, if it is binding up it can cause an exhuast restriction, but this wouldn't usually occurr at idle it would usually occurr when the turbo is spooling up. Even if the turbo was locked up tight I don't think it would make it run like crap at idle just under power. Check your cats and make sure they are not clogged either, but I highly doubt this is an issue, but something to check.

I personally think you have a bad sensor or such. Let me know what you find I am curious to see. Just remember if you have compression, spark, and fuel you will have combustion.

[veedubmechanic]

sounds like you blew off a intercooler hose, its on the driver side under the ps fluid resivour