Expert opinions urgently required.....
My 1999 (T-reg) 1998cc 16v Peugeot 306 XSI has a wierd engine characteristic that I?m a bit baffled by. It only seems to happen when the car has been running for half an hour or longer, and seems to come and go a lot. I suspect it?s to do with the fuelling. When it?s misbehaving, the engine is very hesitant, it takes a few seconds to respond to the throttle, even when out of gear, and the engine seems to have difficulty in responding to changes in engine speed, e.g. when changing down to a lower gear and pressing the accelerator I get a hesitation that can last a couple of seconds before the engine pulls forward in a rather lumpy manner. This never happens within the first
20 minutes of any journey, and the car might behave normally if it gets to remain at the same engine speed e.g. when cruising along the motorway for an hour. On Tuesday it was fine on a long motorway journey until I hit stop-start traffic and it started misbehaving, it got got so bad that the engine started stalling when left to idle. Whenever I started the engine following a stall it would start on the button and behave normally for a few seconds (presumably until the automatic choke turned itself off) and then would go back to misbehaving. Then on one particular occasion when the engine cut out when I was changing between gears at about 25mph I just dropped the clutch into 2nd gear and bump started the engine, it spluttered and lurched into life and the problem instantly disappeared for the rest of the journey (but this problem still occurs at the moment just as it did before).Any ideas what this could be? I?m baffled because it only seems to happen when the engine is hot, and i?m confused at how bump-starting the engine temporarily cleared it on Tuesday - I?ve thought it could be a clogged/collapsed cat, or a ropey lambda sensor - Any other ideas what it might be? The car has done 100k miles by the way, it makes a bit of a tappy/ticky noise at 2k+ RPM but i?m told this is common on
306s and is probably just noisy fuel injectors........