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[Kevin B]

Hi all,

 

After a frustrating Saturday spent chasing a no-start situation at the shop we pushed the car onto the trailer for a tow to Road Atlanta hoping for help with a diagnosis/fix prior to Sunday's ARRC ECR start.

 

First off, many thanks to Tom Fowler, Dave Wheeler, Dan Tiley and Tom's ace mechanic, Ryan, for their help, ideas, and freely offered, known-good, replacement/test parts...  Those guys had their hands full with many(!) other customer cars yet still took the time to listen to the troubleshooting steps we'd already taken.  They then offered their insight into likely culprits and steered us to the next areas to consider. 

 

The problem:

The car came off track 1 month prior, running well, and was driven off of the trailer and parked.  Flash forward, no start on a Friday afternoon a month later.  The only changes made on the car were the replacement of consumables (rotors/pads and fluids) since it's last outing so there were no real "aha" before/after potential causes we could think of.

The starter turned over strong but we had no spark at the plug.

We had a fully charged battery

There was good fuel pressure at the line when jumped and with key, with all F/P relays working fine.

All electrical connections were cleaned, reconnected and checked for good fitment.

The voltage across all under-hood relays/fuses/links was normal.  We replaced F/P link and Main Relay just to be sure, with no results.

We could read correct voltage on all stages up to the CPS but were out of diagnostic tools/parts so that's when we loaded up on the trailer to avoid having to throw all new parts at the problem.

 

On Sunday morning at the track we replaced:

Igniter

CPS

Coil Pack

CPU

 

and then, in a, "we've tried most everything else, what if" effort, we tried a different AFM. 

 

Bingo!

 

I had no idea they could fail (like a light bulb) and that would kill spark.  In the course of troubleshooting we'd unplugged/re-plugged it multiple times, checking connectivity, but didn't really focus on it as a potential problem area...

 

This might have been common knowledge to all but I couldn't find reference to an AFM as a likely source when we were researching the problem so I hope this might help the next guys who encounter the problem.

 

 

And, while we missed qualifying and started DFL in the ECR, we had a blast working our way slowly up through much of the field.  The most satisfying part of the weekend for me, though, came hours later when I drove the car back into the shop over the same floor we'd pushed it across the day before.

 

Thanks again to Tom and Ryan (OPM Autosports), Dave (Advanced Autosports) and Dan (Ti-speed Engineering) for your help yesterday.

 

 

Kevin Bailey