Having some weird problem... I was driving last night and about 1 minute after setting off it I was cruising very sedately in 2nd gear and mid-corner it lurched and almost stalled suddenly. I kept it going with a bit of clutch and it seemed fine for about 15 minutes after that.

Then I get caught in some heavy traffic and it starts idling roughly and seems to have much less power... I've got to ride the clutch a bit to get moving in 1st gear... and the exhaust sounds like a WRX. No smoke or steam is being emitted from the exhaust.

I manage to limp the car to a place to park it.. Had a look under the bonnet and there's a smell of burning plastic coming from somewhere. But no visible sign of smouldering plastic at all.

Went to pick the car up this morning and crawled home in low power WRX mode the whole way. It starts easily, and idles without wanting to stall, but sounds sort of like it's running on 3 cylinders.

After poking around the engine bay, got a couple of queries: I checked the MAP sensor, gave it a clean with WD40, but noticed there's another connector plug coming from the same loom wiring section that's not plugged in anywhere... See this vid (framegrab below):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSOlZSSUUDE

Is that normal?

Also, the FAQ suggests there should be an intake air temp sensor: http://i147.photobucket.com/albums/r285/bcfczuluarmy/sensorslocationsinenginebay.jpg

But mine looks like this:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycGFq780bEE

There seems to be no sensor attached there... But there is something plugged in further around underneath the throttle body as seen in the last few seconds of the above video.

Here's another video of the engine running, there's a pretty noticeable sound that I can only describe as a scraping / friction sound. It can be heard pretty clearly in the video. And I showed the exhaust doing the subaru thing at the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FFWqE3v31M

Hints? Advice? Diagnosis?

But would a cam jump a tooth for only 2 seconds, then run fine for 15 minutes, and then go back to running badly? Seems unlikely. And doesn't address the burning plastic smell...

I would do a compression test on all the cylinders and you may find that cylinder two may have issues due the the bits you mention on the plug.

Hopefully not but from what you describe it doesn't sound very clever.

The cracks on the coil packs is nothing much to worry about.

Carl

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