No power until 3500rpm

[student9000s]

any ideas on what could be causing it?
when i say no power i mean none. Its as though i were in a higher gear.
i like the fact that my car likes going fast but mister officer didn't

[BillJ]

Hi, student9000s. Is the car a turbo or non-turbo?

[student9000s]

none turbo 2.3 she has 240,000km on her

[cdcarlsson]

I had a similar problem with my '87 2.0i but that was due to the knock sensor being faulty and causing the engine management to retard the ignition heavily.

I presume your car might well have Trionic management which doesn't have the knock sensor, but maybe others can tell you that for sure.

[student9000s]

i'm thinking sensors might be the problem just wanted to know if anyone else had similar problems

[pieceofsaab]

yeah mine has the same problem. My 9000 turbo throws me back nicely when i floor it and it downshifts to about 4k but off the line it's slower than anything. I raced my dad in our 114 hp jetta 8 valve and it took me off the line but i passed him later. I figured it was turboo lag

[BillJ]

Originally Posted by pieceofsaab

I figured it was turboo lag

But not in a non-turbo... :wink:

student9000s, what year is your car? That will tell us what engine management it has, although I'm not sure any non-turbos had the Trionic system.

Anything more you can tell us about the car would be great, as it would help us focus on the problem. For example, is it manual or auto?

I assume from your handle that it's a 9000S?

[conradFL]

Originally Posted by BillJ

But not in a non-turbo... :wink:

I think he was referring to his own car getting beat off the line and coming back to win.

[student9000s]

its a 91 standard with 241k

[student9000s]

ok a funny thing happened, i took out the spark plugs and cleanede them off and she worked well for about 2 days, then back to the unfortunatness, but when i went to clean them again they were fine , now im confused

[BillJ]

I believe your car has Direct Ignition. This is rather fussy about the plugs, because it uses the plugs as sensors. Only the correct NGK plugs will do and old ones will give you problems. I'm guessing that if your plugs were old enough to need cleaning, they need replacing.

If they aren't the right plugs, change them. I have a '91 handbook here that says the 2.3i uses NGK BCPR6ES. The "R" part is very important as this denotes a built-in resistor and using a non-resistive plug is likely to damage the DI, as well as causing the car to run poorly.

[student9000s]

i take it that means that the bosh ones i have are useless eh

[BillJ]

Absolutely, and they may well be your problem. A number of people have tried them (not sure why, but they seem a popular "upgrade" in the US) and the car runs fine initially. Then after a thousand miles or so, things start going wrong. Of course, it can't be down to the plugs - they're almost new

A lot of people have trouble believing that a car can be tied so tightly to one particular brand of plug, but it's true. The DI was developed with the NGK plugs and uses properties of the plugs that aren't even listed in the specification of other plugs. Hence an equivalent Bosch plug for other cars using those NGK plugs isn't necessarily an equivalent for them in a DI application.

If you do have DI, i.e. no plug leads (wires) or distributor, then fit the BCPR6ES plugs gapped to 1.0mm and take it from there. Hopefully, you'll have no further problems.