Hi guys, I haven't posted here in ages since after I "gave" the 'lude to my dad after college. Well I recently bought a place in the city with a garage and stole the car back from him. It has developed quite a bit of problems since I got it back but most of which I was able to fix on my own thanks to this and other forums.

So the one problem I haven't been able to fix was this strange hesitation/dying problem when the foot is down in the lower gears. Originally, the car would just climb up to speed but not really complain other than tell you it has no torque. Now though, with the foot down, it sometimes dies and when it dies, it dies hard. It's like I'm applying full brakes when I'm not and the RPM drops fast. It's kind of scary seeing your RPMs drop from 3000+ to 0 in less than a second. Sometimes the oil light comes on afterwards and takes a bit of time to start the car up again. Originally I thought something was wrong with fuel/air delivery and have cleaned up my K&N filter, EGR valve and ports, injectors and replaced the fuel filter. Now I'm thinking that poor fuel deliver should not cause my car to feel like it's braking heavily.

I keep checking the oil before I use the car in the morning and verify that the oil level on the dipstick is between the two dots. I use Mobil1 synthetic exclusively (which I now have heard has failed API standards) and I've replaced the stock cat with a magnaflow cat (it was clogged to hell anyway) and I'm slowly running out of ideas. I've had a mechanic replace my valve cover gasket and check the timing belt. Both are okay according the mechanic.

No idling problems either. The tach sits at 700ish RPM and stays there while I'm sitting in traffic after the car is warmed up.

Oh one last thing; this only happens when the car is at operating temperatures which leads me to believe it's one of the billions of sensors connected to the engine/tranny. Which one though?

 

auto or manual

 

5speed manual tranny

 

symptoms are now a bit different. Car does die randomly while driving. Even with the foot down, it feels like the engine slowly loses power until finally, the engine dies. Starting it up again requires a few tries before it goes. Anyone have any ideas? Can a faulty main relay cause this to happen?