I was just at the Indy chapter autocross, and went home without getting a single clean run in. After about 20 seconds of first gear bursts (6-8K) and second gear, the car completely loses power. No response from the throttle. The engine then dies completely. After 1 minute, I can restart it and it's fine. Idle is fine, VTEC is fine. No smoke whatsoever. There are no codes being thrown. This happened again when I tried a second run (exactly the same), and so I declined to try a third. This happened at Mid-Ohio 3 months ago, also.

There is no sputtering, it justs "shuts down". I believe this is an ignition problem, because my experience with fuel related problems is that the car will usually sputter and die (I've been wrong before). This results in me, still traveling around the course at about 35mph, suddenly without power steering, not to mention the brakes are 10x harder to depress (no engine vacuum for the booster).

However, my car also will not start every once and awhile until I wait 10 minutes. I'm pretty sure this is a Main Fuel Relay issue. So I may be wrong about the ignition.

Anyone have any solution/comments?

thanks

 

When was the last time your distributor cap/rotor/plugs/plug wires were changed? If its been a while, I'd definately change them. Could be a bad ignition switch, but that wouldn't matter about high RPM. Could be a main relay, but that would have more to do with heat than anything else.

 

That's what I've been thinking, and that's what was suggested to me by another racer. What I don't understand is why this occurs only under a large engine load: 1st gear start, rev until redline, off throttle while braking so revs drop to 7K and then punch it again, then repeat.

The engine isn't overheating so I don't think that it's heat related (distributor components absorbing to much heat). Engine temp is normal.

I do need to replace the MFR anyway, so it's possible that this is causing my problem.

Anyone have any comments with respect to high revs?

Thanks for your help

 

I would start off with the cap/rotor/plugs/plug wires. If that doesn't solve it, I'd replace the Main Relay. Its most likely one of those two.

 

Thanks for your help.

I cna't find any threads where someone had a similar problem, which has me a bit worried.