97 Talon ESi drivability issues

[volvnatic]

Hi, folks, I am looking at a friend's Eagle Talon ESi, '97 MY manual transmission, approx. 160k miles. She had been driving the car with a steadily worsening problem with the engine not making power, and I had no idea how bad it was until I drove the car.

She dropped it off with me and I had a chance to try it out for a couple of hours in traffic and on deserted streets. Here were the symptoms when I first tried it:

- harsh idle (but steady RPMS), wanted to stall with AC on
- did not want to accelerate
- sometimes felt like it was in limp-home mode, except eventually it would make power
- felt like an old car with a vacuum advance distributor, with the vacuum disconnected (no timing advance), OR
- also felt like an old Volvo turbo I had where the knock sensor went bad and kept retarding the timing, OR
- maybe even like an over-rev fuel cutoff, except this was from load, not from RPMs
- ran better when stone cold than after warmup

After experimenting for a while, I found that if I gave it the throttle VERY GENTLY and GRADUALLY, like maybe driving a car with the clutch almost gone, it drove much better. And when I did drive it that way, it felt more like the knock sensor in that old Volvo than anything else.

Soooo, I went and filled up with Premium fuel and drove for another hour. WOW, big improvement but still far from normal. Now the idle is basically OK, does not want to stall with AC on. Easier to accelerate, but still need to be very progressive with the throttle and slip the clutch a bit not only from a stop, but with every shift.

BIGGEST improvement is shown if I keep the revs up over 4000 all the time when shifting, high revs seem to keep it happy, but it's still a bear to drive in even light traffic on a secondary highway (easy to make it lug when dropping down a gear, for example).

Sorry for the long-winded post, but I want to be as clear as possible as I am an older car guy so this car is a bit outside my tech talk vocabulary.... my daily driver is a '75 Volvo 164e with D-jet injection....

Thanks in advance
Steve